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Ever since IBM supercomputer Watson beat Jeopardy! champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, there’s been a lot of talk about putting the computer’s question-and-answer capabilities to real applications. In addition to consuming massive amounts of information, the supercomputer has been trained to understand literary references, interpret linguistic nuance, generate hypotheses, perform analysis, and score its own answers for likelihood of accuracy. All of these abilities enable Watson to make reasoned judgments, a skill hitherto attributed exclusively to human beings

Rodrigo Hamede, of the University of Tasmania, studies Tasmanian devils in the wild. He shot videos of some of the endangered carnivorous marsupials after he and his colleagues conducted a study of how much contact devils had with one another in Narawntapu National Park, on Tasmania's northern coast. [More]

One day 12-year-old Elizabeth McIngvale became obsessed with the number 42, which happened to be her mother’s age at the time, 11 years ago.

TAIPEI (Reuters) - A boat built completely from plastic bottles and other recycled materials, including old advertising banners, set sail in Taiwan to raise awareness about the marine environment. The trimaran, named the "Polli-Boat," had as its main flotation system a series of interlocking plastic bricks made from plastic bottles with strengthened polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the most common plastic in use today

By Chikako Mogi TOKYO (Reuters) - Economic risks are too high for Japan to pull the plug on its 54 nuclear plants next year despite intense public pressure on Tokyo to cut reliance on atomic power in favor of other clean energy sources. [More]

Everything has a downside--even optimism. [More]

While you’re humming along to the Talking Heads, I’d like to consider another group who can listen to the Talking Heads without really hearing them. [More]

Inventions exist today that would have boggled the mind just a generation ago. I play Scrabble daily with people all over the country on a smartphone that I carry in my pocket. This device is remarkably versatile and powerful

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The underpinnings of autism are turning out to be even more varied than the disease's diverse manifestations. In four new studies and an analysis published June 8 researchers have added some major landmarks in the complex landscape of the disease, uncovering clues as to why the disease is so much more prevalent in male children and how such varied genetic mutations can lead to similar symptoms.

Every year on June 8, ocean enthusiasts celebrate World Oceans Day . Last year over 300 official events in 45 countries recognized how the Earth’s largest and most complex ecosystem affects not only the rest of the planet and its inhabitants, but how the seas touch upon the essence of being human and the connectivity of the human-sphere to the ocean-sphere.

From the outlook of a planet that resides next to a quiet, relatively predictable star, the circumstances that lead to dramatic stellar explosions elsewhere in the universe can sound somewhat improbable. Some such blasts, known as type Ia supernovae, occur when a small, dense star known as a white dwarf--roughly the diameter of Earth, but hundreds of thousands of times more massive--grows too large by siphoning material off a neighboring star, igniting a thermonuclear explosion.

The already rare Yangtze finless porpoise ( Neophocaena phocaenoides asiaeorientalis ) faces an 80 percent drop in its population over the next 30 years, according to research by the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Currently, around 1,000 of the freshwater porpoises live in China's Yangtze River and its surrounding lakes, down from 2,700 in 1991 and 2,000 in the year 2000. That number continues to drop 6.4 percent a year, according to Wang Ding , principal investigator for the Institute, who told the Xinhua News Agency, "The next 10 years will be a critical period for the conservation of this species." [More]

By Marian Turner of Nature magazine Time might heal metaphorical heartbreak, but an injured heart can rarely repair itself. [More]

* No injuries reported so far * Fire 'very large, very intense' [More]