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Life, Nature, Society
Irreversible loss: 4,500-year-old 19-square-mile ice shelf breaks away in Canada, 10x loss expected this summer
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TORONTO, Ontario (AP) -- A chunk of ice shelf nearly the size of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island in Canada's northern Arctic, another dramatic indication of how warmer temperatures are changing the polar frontier, scientists said Wednesday.
Warship now a home for fish: U.S.S. Oriskany, The Great Carrier Reef, is largest vessel ever sunk to make a reef
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PENSACOLA, Fla. - For Thom Dietmeyer, a retired naval officer, standing again on the bridge of his old ship was a dream come true, even if he was 70 feet below the surface of the ocean. “I knew exactly where I was going as soon as I got down there,” he said, recalling the dive, which took place a year ago last May on the wreck of an aircraft carrier called the Oriskany. The U.S.S. Oriskany, known as the Mighty-O, was commissioned in 1950 and served in Korea and Vietnam. The ship was sunk by the Navy in May 2006 under a pilot program to convert decommissioned vessels into artificial reefs. At 44,000 tons, 888-foot-long, it is by far the largest vessel ever sunk to make a reef.
Ron Paul addresses crowd of more than 10000 people at Minneapolis rally, counter-convention rivals RNC next door
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MINNE- APOLIS, Minnesota (CNN) -- While Republicans pow- wowed in St. Paul, sup- porters of Ron Paul threw their own party in neighboring Minneapolis. "Freedom brings people together," Paul said before a sold-out crowd at Tuesday's Rally for the Republic.
Paul, who said he entered the presidential race reluctantly, told the roaring audience, "I lost my skepticism. I hope you lost your apathy." As the congressman stepped on stage, red, white and blue confetti fell from the ceiling during a two-minute standing ovation.
Paul said he entered the presidential race not because of what he wanted to do but because of what he did not want to do. "I did not want to run people's lives. I did not want to run the economy and I did not want to run the world. I didn't have the authority to do it, and I didn't have the Constitution behind me to do it," said Paul, who has served in the House of Representatives for more than 30 years.
New contender in the browser wars: Google to launch open source web browser Chrome on Tues., takes on Microsoft
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Google is launching an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox. The browser is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.
Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come. "We realised... we needed to completely rethink the browser," said Google's Sundar Pichai in a blog post. The new browser will help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programs. Chrome will be an open-source product, meaning anyone can modify the software code and add features.
Google has a suite of web apps, such as Documents, Picasa and Maps which offer functionality that is beginning to replace offline software. "What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build," Mr Pichai, VP Product Management, wrote.
Zoo Atlanta celebrates arrival of baby panda, 2nd cub of mother Lun Lun and only panda born in US in 2008 so far
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The Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Base in Sichuan Province announced that 11-year-old panda Lun Lun gave birth to a cub in Zoo Atlanta in the United States at 10:11 AM Beijing time on August 31. It was her second birth since the base and the US zoo launched an international panda breeding program in 1999. Lun Lun gave birth to Mei Lan at the zoo in Sept 2006. Her second cub is the only giant panda born so far in the US in 2008, said Dennis Kelly, Zoo Atlanta's president and CEO.
The zoo is continuing to monitor Lun Lun closely for a possible second birth. Twin births take place nearly 50 percent of the time with giant pandas. A second cub could arrive as much as 12 to 24 hours after the first, according to Zhang Zhihe, chief of the base.
Lun Lun is caring for her cub, which is about the size of a human hand. The zoo's veterinary team will conduct the cub's first checkup when it is deemed possible to do so without disrupting maternal care. The zoo's animal management and veterinary teams, joined by Yang Kuixing, an official from the Chengdu base, will continue round-the-clock monitoring of the mother and cub, Kelly said. read more »
Towers of food, farms in the sky: self-sustaining skyscrapers in the city, vertical farming gains new interest
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What if “eating local” in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?
Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact. read more »
Galactic clash unmasks dark matter: ordinary mater and dark matter separate as two massive galaxies collide
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Striking evidence has been found for the enigmatic "stuff" called dark matter which makes up 23% of the Universe, yet is invisible to our eyes. The results come from astronomical observations of a titanic collision between two clusters of galaxies 5.7 billion light-years away. Astronomers detected the dark matter because it separated from the normal matter during the cosmic smash-up. The research team are to publish their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.
They used the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes to study the object MACSJ0025.4-1222 - formed after an incredibly energetic collision between two large galaxy clusters. Each of these large clusters contains about a quadrillion times the mass of our Sun.
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