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The mystery of human consciousness appears routinely as one of the greatest science problems of all time. One way to get a grip on this seemingly ineffable property would be to build a conscious machine.

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent BONN, Germany (Reuters) - The world is off course in fighting climate change and governments need to boost green energies to build new momentum, the head of the U.N. panel of climate scientists said on Monday.

Liberals might be more likely than conservatives to check out what you are looking at, according to a study published online November 4 in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics . Experiments show that people take longer to notice when an object appears if they have first seen a face looking in the other direction

Eshel Ben-Jacob is interested not only in the genomes of the bacteria he studies but also in their personalities. He compares many to Hollywood celebrities. “On the one hand, we admire them, but on the other hand, we think that they are stupid,” says Ben-Jacob, a professor of physics at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Electricity controls much of the human body: consider the electrical firing of neurons and the current transmitted by the heart. Yet historically the electrodes that have been used in medicine to monitor and regulate essential activity have been biologically incompatible because they are stiff, big and water-sensitive. Now scientists are setting new standards with their designs for flexible, stretchable and waterproof circuits and electrodes that mimic the properties of human tissues

History is littered with private indiscretions made public--some have just been more public than others:

There is some speculation among some politicians and pundits that the fog of war will soon extend to the Internet, if it has not already, given a recent report that the U.S. Defense Department will introduce its first cyber warfare doctrine this month, combined with similar announcements from the governments of Australia, China and the U.K.

In a unique fusion of biology and physics, researchers have created the world's first living laser. Single cells containing a special protein that acts as an optical amplifier have been coaxed to emit green laser light, according to a new study. And, perhaps surprisingly, the cell survives its stint as part of the laser

When the internet first got kicking, some scholars of democracy and civil society thought that online discussions could create what they called a "conversational democracy”: an ongoing town hall without bricks and mortar. But the internet may not be as democratic as they'd imagined, according to a study in the journal Communication Research .

It came from outer space. It being the stuff of life--amino acids, sugars and other organic molecules. [More]

Sprawl isn't just eating up the countryside--it's also blocking the breezes that would otherwise clear out air pollution. That's according to a new study of Houston from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research

It happened in 1995.

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Mara Hvistendahl's book , Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. The technology that ultimately became the dominant method of sex selection around the world began as a tool for navigation. The story of ultrasound dates to 1794, when an Italian biologist curious about how bats find their way in the dark discovered sonar, or the fact that distance can be determined by bouncing sound waves off a faraway object and measuring how long it takes for the waves to ricochet back

Cyber attacks may not be a new phenomenon but the recent successes scored against high-profile targets including CitiGroup , Google , RSA and government contractors such as Lockheed Martin underscore the targets' current failure to block security threats enabled by the Internet. Malicious hackers use the very same technology that enables online banking, entertainment and myriad other communication services to attack these very applications, steal user data, and then cover their own tracks. [More]