October 13, 2007
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  • News Bytes of the Week—Ovulating Strippers Make Bigger Tips
  • Radio Free Africa
  • And the Oscar Goes to… a Robot
  • Tree Frog Inspires New Easy-Off Stickies
  • Making Plastic as Strong as Steel

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  • German Ertl wins Nobel chemistry prize
  • Hard disk pioneers win physics Nobel
  • Bright Future Ahead for Organic TVs
  • The Secret Lives of Tool-Wielding Crows
  • Sensor-Rigged Helmet Gives Football Players a Heads Up on Concussions

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  • 5 Goals for Exploring the Solar System [Interactive]
    Forget Mars -- there are plenty of more important goals we should be pursuing in space.
  • Constellation/Orion: Back to the Moon [Slideshow]
    America prepares for the next lunar missions
  • Do Nanoparticles and Sunscreen Mix?
    Your first encounter with "better" living through nanotechnology may be your sunscreen
  • Meraki's Guerilla Wi-Fi to Put a Billion More People Online
    Like some kind of techno-utopian Johnny Appleseed, a start-up called Meraki wants to cover the earth with ad hoc Wi-Fi networks
  • Privacy Isn't Dead, or At Least It Shouldn't Be: A Q&A; with Latanya Sweeney
    In a post-9/11 world, where security demands are high, personal privacy does not have to be sacrificed, says computer scientist Latanya Sweeney, who discusses a few ways to save it.

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  • What is a neural network and how does its operation differ from that of a digital computer? (In other words, is the brain like a computer?)
  • Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes, yet there are only 24 hours in a day?
  • How far are we from realizing practical benefits from nanotechnology?
  • Is it possible to engineer viruses to perform specific tasks within a human host--that is, to create viruses that are beneficial rather than detrimental to human health?
  • For which diseases or conditions is umbilical cord blood stem-cell therapy most effective?

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  • Fact or Fiction?: Black Is Better than White for Energy-Efficient Screens
    Black isn't the new green
  • Fact or Fiction?: Vitamin Supplements Improve Your Health
    Americans pour billions of dollars into supplements every year—an investment in health or money down the drain?
  • Strange but True: Helmets Attract Cars to Cyclists
    Although you might not want to leave your protective gear at home, just know that if you do, drivers will be a lot more scared of hitting you.
  • Fact or Fiction?: Glass Is a (Supercooled) Liquid
    Are medieval windows melting?
  • Fact or Fiction?: Premium Gasoline Delivers Premium Benefits to Your Car
    Exploding the myth that premium gasoline delivers better performance in the average automobile

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  •   Big Lab on a Tiny Chip
    Squeezing a chemistry lab down to fingernail size could provide instant medical tests at home and on the battlefield
  •   Experimental Drugs on Trial
    A controversial lawsuit challenges the FDA's system of controlling access to experimental drugs and, some say, the scientific basis of drug approval
  •   Sowing a Gene Revolution
    A new green revolution based on genetically modified crops can help reduce poverty and hungerbut only if formidable institutional challenges are met
  • Data Center in a Box
    A shipping container stuffed with servers could usher in the era of cloud computing
  •   Broadband Room Service by Light
    Encoded light transmissions can provide the wireless devices in a room with multimedia Web services such as videoconferencing, movies on demand and more

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  •   Liquid Zoom
    Adaptive lenses change magnification without moving
  • Saving Gas and Lives
    Can the U.S. improve fuel economy without sacrificing safety?
  •   Déjà Vu Disks
    For Blu-ray and HD DVD, encryption and court orders prove futileagain
  •   Muons for Peace
    New way to spot hidden nukes gets ready to debut
  •   Laboratory Letdowns
    Accidental infections in biosafety labs go unreported?

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  • A Customer Base of One
    Personal fabricators aim at letting you manufacture your own products
  • Existential Terroir in Northern California
    140 million years of geologic history in a bottle of wine
  • Meddling with Human Nature
    The political outcomes of biotechnology
  • Why Haven't We Found an AIDS Vaccine?
    Jon Cohen argues that the obstacles may be more human than viral

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  • A Little Privacy, Please
    Computer scientist Latanya Sweeney helps to save confidentiality with "anonymizing" programs, "deidentifiers" and other clever algorithms. Whether they are enough, however, is another question
  • Dangling a Carrot for Vaccines
    Drug companies do not see much of a market in treating diseases of developing nations. Michael Kremer hopes to change that--with a plan that taps the profit motive
  • The Implicit Prejudice
    Mahzarin Banaji can show how we connect "good" and "bad" with biased attitudes we hold, even if we say we don't. Especially when we say we don't
  • Android Science
    Hiroshi Ishiguro makes perhaps the most humanlike robots around--not particularly to serve as societal helpers but to tell us something about ourselves
  • A Proposition for Stem Cells
    Last fall Robert Klein got Californians to vote for embryonic stem cell work. That was a piece of cake compared with getting the resulting research agency off the ground

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