Search engine giant Google is sending a representative to China this week to talk with the country’s copyright watchdog.  The move is designed to cool Chinese authors’ heated complaints against the company over copyright violations, a Google senior executive said yesterday.
 

Sirenia Avendano cries as she speaks of sending money to her sons in the U.S.
During the best of the times, Miguel Salcedo’s son, an illegal immigrant in San Diego, would be sending home hundreds of dollars a month to support his struggling family in Mexico. But at times like these, with the American economy out of [...]

Adelie penguins have survived in Antarctica for thousands of years and are invaluable for genetic research.
Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 [...]

The US’s first marijuana cafe opened on Friday, posing an early test of the Obama administration’s move to relax policing of medical use of the drug.
 

Cynomolgus macaque. New research in these primates suggests that a gene delivery strategy that produces follistatin can improve muscle mass and function.
A study appearing in Science Translational Medicine puts scientists one step closer to clinical trials to test a gene delivery strategy to improve muscle mass and function in patients with certain degenerative muscle disorders.

The IMaX instrument not only depicts the solar surface, it also makes magnetic fields visible; these appear as black or white structures in the polarised light.
The Sun is a bubbling mass. Packages of gas rise and sink, lending the sun its grainy surface structure, its granulation. Dark spots appear and disappear, clouds of matter dart [...]

Households that could afford to have one spouse stay home find roles upended by layoffs in male-dominated industries
Jeff and Vicki Grenz celebrated their 25th anniversary on Sept. 12, 2007. The date marked another milestone for the California couple: Ms. Grenz went back to work. 
 

Even as drug makers promise to support Washington’s health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years.
 

 Today’s 60-year-olds are the first modern generation to be less healthy than their immediate predecessors.  A health timebomb is hitting baby boomers: the over-60 year olds are sufferring more illnesses caused by bad diet and lack of exercise.
 

Cool Rider
Now you can have all the fun of a Segway without looking like a dork. Notice how the Cool Rider is positioned to be a much more stylish conveyance, ridden by a suave gentleman with an insouciant sunglasses-wearing air.
 

Cassini-Huygens swings by Earth and accelerates towards Saturn.

When Europe’s comet chaser Rosetta swings by Earth on Nov. 13 for a critical gravity assist, tracking data will be collected to precisely measure the satellite’s change in orbital energy. The results could help unravel a cosmic mystery that has stumped scientists for two decades.

Yellow jewelweed (impatiens pallida) appears to have the ability to recognize ‘relatives’ from ’strangers’ and then shift resources for growth to benefit relatives.
Although plants have the ability to sense and respond to other plants, their ability to recognize kin and act altruistically has been the subject of few studies. The authors explored kin recognition in [...]

This photograph shows a female of an as yet un-named boneworm in the genus Osedax, which has been carefully removed from the whale bone in which it was growing.
It sounds like a classic horror story — eyeless, mouthless worms lurk in the dark, settling onto dead animals and sending out green “roots” to devour their [...]

Artist’s impression of a baby star still surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which planets are forming.
A ground-breaking census of 500 stars, 70 of which are known to host planets, has successfully linked the long-standing “lithium mystery” observed in the Sun to the presence of planetary systems. Using ESO’s successful HARPS spectrograph, a team of [...]

Make a goat happy. Let ‘em eat your lawn!

Forget gas-guzzlin’, smoke-belchin’ lawnmowers. The eco-friendly way to mow grass and get rid of unwanted vegetation is to … rent some goats!
The city of Andover, Massachusetts has some unwanted guests: invasive species like the European buckthorn tree and the strangling bittersweet vine from Asia are shouldering out [...]

SFFaudio has just announced their 4th Annual Make an Audiobook, Get an Audiobook Challenge. They have twenty Science Fiction and Fantasy titles of public domain and Creative Commons novels that they’d like to see freely available as audiobooks on the internet. They’re looking for participants to commit to recording and editing the sound files and [...]

Mobile phones and other cordless telephones have a biological effect on the brain, according to new research.

A study at Örebro University in Sweden indicates that mobile phones and other cordless telephones have a biological effect on the brain. It is still too early to say if any health risks are involved, but medical researcher Fredrik [...]

Pacific ocean. Did water come from ice-covered asteroids that may have reached the Earth around one hundred million years after the birth of the planets?

Contrary to preconceived notions, the atmosphere and the oceans were perhaps not formed from vapors emitted during intense volcanism at the dawning of our planet. Francis Albarède of the Laboratoire des [...]

Stefanie Milam, Michel Nuevo and Scott Sandford.
NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life.

Electron beam freeform fabrication process.
A group of engineers working on a novel manufacturing technique at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., have come up with a new twist on the popular old saying about dreaming and doing: “If you can slice it, we can build it.”

9h Capsule Hotel
Japan’s getting yet another capsule hotel, but this one aims to provide something unprecedented: Luxury. (Pics)
 

Honda Hybrid hits pedestrians
Hybrid vehicles, which creep along almost silently at low speeds on electric power, are more likely to hit pedestrians or bicycles than regular cars, a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finds.
 

The Human eye
Autism affects an estimated 1 in 150 children today, making it more common than childhood cancer, juvenile diabetes and pediatric AIDS combined. Despite its widespread effect, autism is not well understood and there are no objective medical tests to diagnose it. Recently, University of Missouri researchers have developed a pupil response test that [...]

Swift X-ray observations of galaxy NGC 5408 indicate its ultraluminous X-ray source undergoes periodic changes every 115.5 days.

While astronomers have studied lightweight and heavyweight black holes for decades, the evidence for black holes with intermediate masses has been much harder to come by. Now, astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., find [...]

Text messaging on a mobile phone.

The world record for fastest text message typing is held by a 21-year old college student from Utah, but his dexterous digits could mean serious injury later on. Most adults aged 18-21 prefer texting over e-mail or phone calls, and ergonomics researchers are starting to wonder whether it’s putting the [...]