International domain names or addresses that can be written in non-English characters are expected to be approved this week.  This will spark one of the biggest changes to the internet in its four-decade history.
 

A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes. The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany’s economic recovery.
Germany could raise 100bn euros (£91bn) if the richest people paid [...]

Vampires
One dark and stormy evening, Spanish neurologist Juan Gomez-Alonso was watching a vampire movie when he realized something strange; he noticed that vampires behave an awful lot like people with rabies. The virus attacks the central nervous system, altering the moods and behaviors of those infected. Sufferers become agitated and demented, and, much like vampires, [...]

The galaxy cluster named JKCS041 is some 10.2 billion light years away
The furthest galaxy cluster from Earth has been spotted some 10.2 billion light years away.  The group of galaxies, known as JKCS041 has beaten the previous record holder by around a billion light years.  It appears as it was when the Universe was only [...]

SPACE – The final frontier? Ok well maybe Mars has been done a few times.
Editorial illustrator and data visualizer Bryan Christie created this fantastic graphic of Mars missions.

The worldwide recession has hit a lot of people hard, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Far from it actually, as is the case with property. As the price of real estate has fallen, there are plenty of bargains to be had all around the world! The villa pictured is in Halcyon Hills, Greece.
No [...]

Sanwei Bookshop in central Beijing
China has excelled in recent years at producing Olympic gold medalists, skilled factory workers and more billionaires than any country other than the United States. But authors are another story. The influence of China’s novelists and other writers has long been stunted by the country’s history of censorship and custom of [...]

Barack Obama
Before they were regulars in front of the camera on The Hill, most politicos practiced posing during their schooldays. We’ve rounded up our favorite yearbook pictures, including Barack Obama’s disco suit and Joe Biden’s dreamy gaze.
 

For the first time in more than 35 years, the U.S. military has met all of its annual recruiting goals, as hundreds of thousands of young people have enlisted despite the near-certainty that they will go to war.  The Pentagon, which made the announcement Tuesday, said the economic downturn and rising joblessness, as well as [...]

The US airlines that created the largest, most redonkulous and abusive fees this year lost the most money last quarter. Airlines with low or no fees lost the least.
Accountants have rigged the system. They create a stream to track the ancillary revenue from fees and they look like heroes when they can report they earned [...]

Young Girl in Profile in Renaissance Dress

This painting, which was sold in auction as “German, Early 19th Century” has gone from being worth $19,000 to millions overnight. The new owner who won it decided to give the painting a thorough checkup, whereupon a fingerprint was found. It matched another found on a confirmed da Vinci [...]

Will the Dead Sea cease to exist as we know it?

The country of Jordan has decided to refill the shrinking Dead Sea with salt water despite concerns from environmentalists about the threat to its unique eco-system.
Water levels in the lowest and saltiest body of water on the planet are falling by more than four feet a [...]

Making a vaccine against seasonal influenza is a constant catch-up game. Scientists must predict which of the constantly mutating virus strains will be most virulent six months in the future, the amount of time it takes to manufacture the vaccine. The system has worked well enough for the regular flu. But when new, virulent strains [...]

Glow Glow Mushrooms!

Biologists have newly identified seven mushroom species that glow-in-the-dark. (The mushrooms may look psychedelic, but they are not in the psilocybe genus.) San Francisco State University biologist Dennis Desjardin found the glowing fungi in Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico. From National Geographic:

Desjardin and colleagues scouted for mushrooms during [...]

Health spending could threaten future living standards
Every generation of Americans should live better than its predecessor. That’s Americans’ core definition of economic “progress.”  But for today’s young, it may be a mirage. Higher health spending, increasing energy prices and stretched governments at all levels may squeeze future disposable incomes — what people have to spend [...]

On any given day, nearly 23 percent of all young Black men ages 16 to 24 who have dropped out of high school are in jail, prison, or a juvenile justice institution in America, according to a disturbing new national report released today on the dire economic and social consequences of not graduating from high [...]

NASA is planning to drop a spent rocket motor into the Cabeus crater on the moon Friday morning as part of the search to find lunar water. The motor is a leftover piece of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that includes a “shepherding spacecraft” that will follow behind the rocket motor before it [...]

Image: Mohd Abubakr
The modern periodic table of elements has been attributed to Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, which he published in 1869. Pictured above is a proposed alternative that is shaped like a circle in order to arrange atoms by relative size:
According to Mohd Abubakr from Microsoft Research in Hyderabad, the table can be improved by [...]

Dr. Ben Wang shows a model of an ‘unmanned aerial vehicle’
Nanotechnology has surprising applications in mundane materials like sunscreen and esoteric items like high-tech body armor for soldiers. But some fear scarier scenarios worthy of a science fiction novel.  At Florida State University, engineers are creating new body armor for American troops. It’s more durable, [...]

Behold this graphic but compelling footage of the first ever elephant birth filmed in Bali, Indonesia.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!!!

Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that pharmacology researchers are developing a drug that could diminish the pleasurable effects of cocaine. Taking the drug might help addicts detoxify with greater success:
The vaccine itself does not destroy cocaine molecules, rather it induces antibodies that bind to it, making the opiate lose its ability to [...]

GOOD’s executive compensation infographic shows the compensation levels of the business world’s top execs, with the number of minimum wage earners each super-suit’s take-home pay would support. Wow that is a lot of capitalistic greed!

You can buy “The Lost Symbol,” by Dan Brown, as an e-book for $9.99 at Amazon.com.  Or you can don a pirate’s cap and snatch a free copy from another online user at RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile and other file-storage sites.
 

High doses of aspirin were used to treat patients during the 1918-1919 pandemic
The high death toll during the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic might be attributed to the misuse of aspirin, says an article.
Aspirin (Getty Images)
Published in the online edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases, the article sounds a cautionary note at a time when health experts are [...]