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Science

Living Earth Simulator will simulate the entire wo->

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes "Described as a “knowledge collider,” and now with a pledge of one billion euros from the European Union, the Living Earth Simulator is a new big data and supercomputing project that will attempt to uncover the underlying sociological and psychological laws that underpin human civilization. In the same way that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider smashes together protons to see what happens, the Living Earth Simulator (LES) will gather knowledge from a Planetary Nervous System (PNS — yes, really) to try to predict societal fluctuations such as political unrest, economic bubbles, disease epidemics, and so on. Orchestrated by FuturICT, which is basically a consortium of preeminent scientists, computer science centers around the world, and high-power computing (HPC) installations, the Living Earth Simulator hopes to correlate huge amounts of data — including real-time sources such as Twitter and web news — and extant, but separate approaches currently being used by other institutions, into a big melting pot of information. To put it into scientific terms, the LES will analyze techno-socio-economic-environmental (!) systems. From this, FuturICT hopes to reveal the tacit agreements and hidden laws that actually govern society, rather than the explicit, far-removed-from-reality bills and acts that lawmakers inexorably enact."
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Indoctrinating Kids To Hate The Press-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "There are all sorts of reasons to distrust the press, but most Americans believe our First Amendment with its Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press are important American ideals. You wouldn't necessarily learn that if you're a student visiting the Ronald Reagan Library, however. The Library is apparently running an exercise with schoolchildren in which they simulate the 1983 invasion of Grenada. Students play different roles, including the press and a faux-President Reagan who has to make all the final decisions. However, the re-enactment seems to focus on one thing and one thing only: how it really was the press that was responsible for the 19 soldiers who died for reporting on the invasion plans. At the end of the exercise, the children who were not playing "the press" immediately start berating the children who were the press, for "killing" 19 soldiers, with the lesson being that if the press had just kept quiet, those 19 soldiers obviously would have survived."
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Malarial Mosquitoes are Evolving Into New Species

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Two strains of the type of mosquito responsible for the majority of malaria transmission in Africa have evolved such substantial genetic differences that they are becoming different species, according to researchers behind two new studies published today in the journal Science. Over 200 million people globally are infected with malaria, according to the World Health Organisation, and the majority of these people are in Africa. Malaria kills one child every 30 seconds."
Space

The Rare Exoplanet with a Double Sunset->

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes "Astronomers have spotted a Jupiter-mass exoplanet happily orbiting the primary star of a binary system 49 light-years from Earth. "Inrakluk" is a rarity as only a few exoplanets have ever been found inside binary systems. It is theorized that the planet-building material would normally be flung out of the young binary star system, hindering the development of planets. But as the existence of Inrakluk proves, stable exoplanets are possible in binary star systems, throwing the leading planetary formation theory into doubt. The researchers have yet to find Tatooine (although, according to the comments at the bottom of the article, they are currently looking for a candidate that may resemble the fictional Star Wars world)."
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Astronaut Sues Dido For Album Cover-> 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Astronaut Bruce McCandless is suing Dido for her album cover that uses a famous NASA photograph of a tiny, tiny, tiny McCandless floating in space. McCandless doesn't own the copyright on the photo, so he's claiming it's a violation of his publicity rights... except that he's so tiny in the photo, it's not like anyone's going to recognize him."
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Ubuntu

Quo Vadis Linux?->

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes "According to the author, internal problems in the Linux community are slowing down, if not stopping the Linux market share in the Desktop area.
He compares the community with a corporation, that needs a board to establish the strategy.
As he states, it seems that all the community has the same goal, but not the same strategy, therefore, the success is still far away."
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"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"