- Friday Apr 28,2006 05:44 AM
- By Mike Lopez
- In Science and Nature
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The flexible displays are black and white only, with 16 shades of gray. Advertisers are interested, despite the lack of color. These devices can have some programming along with the content; they can show coffee ads in the morning and beer ads in the evening, for example. Also, if the reader is standing in a WiFi hotspot, you could access more information from an ad, thereby combining the best of the web with the convenience of newspapers.
LiveScience.com - Europe Tests E-Newspapers
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- Friday Apr 28,2006 05:34 AM
- By Mike Lopez
- In Science and Nature
Noam Chomsky has endured many attempts to disprove his widely respected theories of language, but never have any of them come from a 3-ounce bird.The European starling, a tiny virtuoso, has the ability to learn and recognize a feature of grammar that has long been thought to be unique to human languages, researchers report in a new study.
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- Friday Apr 28,2006 05:25 AM
- By Mike Lopez
- In Science and Nature
MOSCOW (AP) – Russia on Tuesday launched a satellite for Israel that the Israelis say will be used to spy on Iran’s nuclear program.
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- Friday Apr 28,2006 05:06 AM
- By Mike Lopez
- In Science and Nature
Chunks of a comet currently splitting into pieces in the night sky will not strike the Earth next month, nor will it spawn killer tsunamis and mass extinctions, NASA officials said Thursday.
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- Friday Apr 28,2006 05:01 AM
- By Mike Lopez
- In Science and Nature
The moon, that dimpled ball of dusty rock that winds around our planet every 29 days, kindling the muse in poets and sprouting hair on werewolves, just happens to be of the right size and distance to barely cover the Sun’s disk. And, thanks to the inexorable clockwork of orbital mechanics, that circumstance results in a total solar eclipse, somewhere on our planet, about once every 1.6 years. As it is, I’ve seen a half-dozen, most recently in Egypt, on March 29.
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- Thursday Apr 27,2006 08:41 PM
- By Mike Lopez
- In Science and Nature
Sign of Breast Cancer
The first sign of breast cancer is usually a lump or a spot seen on a mammogram. Like all cancers, the disease is the result of unrestrained multiplication of cells. Normal cells divide in a planned way, creating more cells only when needed. Cancerous cells grow and divide without control or order, often making excess tissue that becomes a tumor. Cancer cells may grow into nearby healthy tissue, or they may break away from the tumor and travel through the blood stream or lymphatic system to other parts of the body. For this reason, breast cancer often spreads into the lymph nodes in the armpit, chest, and collarbone area.
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- Tuesday Apr 25,2006 04:12 PM
- By Mike Lopez
- In Science and Nature
As a high-school student in the 1950s, John Koza yearned for a personal computer. That was a tall order back then, as mass-produced data processors such as the IBM 704 were mainframes several times the size of his bedroom. So the cocksure young man went rummaging for broken jukeboxes and pinball machines, repurposing relays and switches and lightbulbs to make a computer of his own design.
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- Tuesday Apr 25,2006 04:12 PM
- By Mike Lopez
- In Science and Nature
The difference between expectations and reality can be brutal. Just ask anyone with a hybrid car. Enticed by impressive mileage estimates, drivers pony up thousands of dollars extra, only to find that their on-road miles per gallon never live up to the sticker’s promise. Conventional-car owners, too, have long complained about the discrepancy between the estimate of fuel economy and the reality of gas consumption, but the gap is an especially bitter pill for anyone who has spent a year on a waiting list.
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- Tuesday Apr 25,2006 04:11 PM
- By Mike Lopez
- In Science and Nature
Cue the Mission Impossible theme. I’m working a top-secret operation, and my support team is monitoring my every movement. OK, so I’m just going to the hardware store, but my girlfriend, Jen, is tracking me. Using a $100 kit from Mologogo (with a $6-a-month data plan), I’ve turned a prepaid cellphone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that Jen can access from any computer. She can view my most recent spot or my past 100 recorded locations as little pushpins stamped with date and time.
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- Tuesday Apr 25,2006 04:11 PM
- By Mike Lopez
- In Science and Nature
Your kid borrows the car, blasts too many techno tracks, and blows out the subwoofer. It used to be that you’d have two choices: Buy a new one (woofer, not kid) or put up with a hoarse bass line. But when a subwoofer pops, it’s usually only the voice coil—the part that drives the cone—that’s burned out; the rest of the assembly is just fine. Boston Acoustics’s SPG555 subwoofer is the first with a replaceable voice coil that you can install yourself. Simply undo six screws around the coil’s cap, swap the fried coil for a new one, and get back to booming. The sub is driven by powerful, hockey-puck-size neodymium magnets, making it half the size and weight of similar units using ferrite magnets, so you won’t have to choose between trunk space and heavy-hitting bass.
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