Meteorites reveal another way to make life’s components

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A meteorite analyzed in the study at its collection site in Antarctica.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2012) — Creating some of life’s building blocks in space may be a bit like making a sandwich — you can make them cold or hot, according to new NASA research. This evidence that there is more than one way to make crucial components of life increases the likelihood that life emerged elsewhere in the Universe, according to the research team, and gives support to the theory that a “kit” of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by impacts from meteorites and comets assisted the origin of life.

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The health insurance industry could be destroyed by a $1000 test

DNA test

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act bars insurers from denying coverage or raising premiums on individuals who show a genetic predisposition toward particular diseases.

The cost of sequencing an individual genome will soon be less than $1,000, reports the New York Times. That’s not nothing, but given what most health care costs, it’s not much. And it means that an individual mandate — or something much like it — is inevitable.

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295 words and phrases blocked by Chinese internet censors

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The Chinese government is not shy about its Internet censorship, even launching an official campaign known as the Golden Shield Project, or “Great Firewall.”

Most people in the world who get into trouble on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites fail to exercise a bit of healthy self-censorship. A new Carnegie Mellon University study has identified the 295 words and phrases the Chinese government looks for when it steps in and forcibly blocks communication between its own citizens.

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Narrow the Gapp challenges app developers to narrow the pay gap

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Unequal pay isn’t just unfair, it’s illegal.

After President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act nearly 50 years ago, on average women are still paid less than their male counterparts for doing comparable jobs in the U.S. — that’s called the pay gap. It means that each time the average woman starts a new job, she’s likely to start from a lower base salary than her male counterparts.

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Antenna’s can steal your smartphone’s secrets

eavesdropping antenna

The processors in smart phones and tablets leak radio signals that betray the encryption keys used to protect sensitive data.

Gary Kenworthy of Cryptography Research held up an iPod Touch on stage and looked over to a TV antenna three meters away at the RSA computer security conference last week. The signal picked up by the antenna, routed through an amplifier and computer software, revealed the secret key being used by an app running on the device to encrypt data. An attacker with access to this key could use it to perfectly impersonate the device he stole it from—to access e-mail on a company server, for example.

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Tooth decay in preschoolers on the rise

cavities in preschoolers

Soaring rates of 2 to 5 year olds with tooth decay.

There has been “a huge increase” in little kids who need general anesthesia for dental procedures, including tooth extractions, crowns and even root canals as dentists are seeing so many preschoolers with cavities and severe tooth decay (6 to 10 cavities or more), according to a report from The New York Times.

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