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[ Editor's note: This excerpt from The Quants, by Scott Patterson (Crown Business, 2010), describes the 2006 Wall Street Poker Night Tournament, which featured professional poker players T. J. Cloutier and Clonie Gowen.

An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics--that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 meters per second. The experiment is called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), and lies 1,400 meters underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy

A few dozen New Yorkers experienced their city at a new pace earlier this month.

Global girths are on the rise--with some 1.5 billion adults now overweight and more than one in 10 adults obese worldwide .

Palestine has grabbed the lion’s share of attention at the U.N. [More]

NAMCHE BAZAAR, Nepal -- By this time next month, Kancha Sherpa will, once again, become a busy man. At 79, he is the last man living among the 103 guides who accompanied the famous mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary on the first successful 1953 expedition to Everest. Come peak tourist season in this ancient village of Internet cafes, Nepali crafts and gear shops that serves as the gateway to Mount Everest Base Camp, Kancha Sherpa will be besieged by journalists and climbers alike eager to hear his memories of the ascent

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine A 90-year-old tuft of hair has yielded the first complete genome of an Aboriginal Australian, a young man who lived in southwest Australia. [More]

By usan Moran of Nature magazine Nitrate levels in the waters off China, Japan and the Korean Peninsula are soaring, according to a 30-year study published in Science today. [More]

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have reconstructed the internal “movie” that plays in a person’s head. [More]

Among the many reasons I chose to pursue physics was the desire to do something that would have a permanent impact. If I was going to invest so much time, energy and commitment, I wanted it to be for something with a claim to longevity and truth.

The Minnesota Twins are my favorite baseball team. [More]

"Food is always more or less in demand," wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. [More]

A warm, fuzzy feeling toward your bobblehead dolls or a shoe collection, say, may reveal a lack of secure relationships, according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology . [More]

The scene at first resembles many that play out daily in the war-torn Red Zone of southern Afghanistan: a pair of Black Hawk helicopters descend on a hillside near the country’s southern border with Pakistan. As the choppers land, U.S. marines leap out, assault rifles ready.

Even if Taliban forces and opium warlords do not try to interfere with mining by Afghan or international companies, other factors could complicate commercialization. Challenges faced at the country’s largest development project, the planned copper mine at Aynak, 20 kilometers south of Kabul, are emblematic