Artificial skin spun from spider silk

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Spider silk could be an ideal answer for helping heal wounds.

Researchers may have found a better alternative for providing skin grafts to wounds.  It turns out that spider silk is legendary for its strength, as well as its possible healing properties. Tissue engineer Hanna Wendt at Medical School Hannover in Germany honed in on this and found that by creating an artificial skin spun from spider silk, we could have an ideal answer for helping heal wounds.

Spoilers actually enhance enjoyment of films or books

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Movies with surprise endings, like The Sixth Sense (starring Bruce Willis and Hayley Joel Osment) are not, it turns out, ruined by spoilers.

We’ve all dodged conversations about who shot JR to covering our eyes when the football results flash up and we go to enormous lengths to not have surprise endings spoiled.

 

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Living in an Age of Hyper-Awareness

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Futurist Thomas Frey:  It’s amazing how a single newscast can set the world on fire.

The very second Standard & Poor’s announced they had downgraded the U.S. Credit rating, communications systems around the world began to boil. Reaction time was critical and those who could react the quickest were able to position the negative news into something less negative, perhaps even a positive.

 

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China becomes No. 2 ad market in the world

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China will surpass Japan in total media spending this year.

Advertising in China, still developing compared to countries like the US and Japan, is beginning to catch up to the demand of consumer-facing companies looking to expand their reach among the world’s largest population and its growing buying power. eMarketer estimates that by the end of this year, ad spending in the China will increase enough to make the country the second-largest advertising market in the world.

 

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Iowa: Now 20% wind-powered

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Taking advantage of the wind in Iowa.

Iowa now gets a higher percentage of its power from wind than any other state in the nation. The Des Moines Register is reporting that Iowa’s wind generation hit the 20% mark last quarter, supplying the state with a full one fifth of its energy needs. That’s really good — like, Denmark good. Stats like this make it harder and harder for cleantech foes to deny that renewable power is fast becoming an integral part of the American energy mix…

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Information could escape from Black Holes after all, study suggests

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Do black holes NOT swallow everything?

New research by scientists at the University of York gives a fresh perspective on the physics of black holes. Black holes are objects in space that are so massive and compact they were described by Einstein as “bending” space. Conventional thinking asserts that black holes swallow everything that gets too close and that nothing can escape, but the study by Prof. Samuel Braunstein and Dr. Manas Patra suggests that information could escape from black holes after all…

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NYPD forms new unit to track troublemakers on social media sites

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The NYPD has formed Facebook and Twitter units in order to track down and monitor criminals and criminal behavior on social media sites.

The New York Police Department has formed a new unit to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

 

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