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+ - Openleaks Founder Sabotaged Wikileaks->

Submitted by SETIGuy
SETIGuy (33768) writes "Former Wikileaks programmer Daniel Domscheit-Berg admits in his book that he sabotaged Wikileaks in a manner that threatens the anonymity of leakers. Since leaving Wikileaks, Domschiet-Berg has become one of the cofounders of Openleaks. This raises the question, if you had material to leak, would you trust it to someone who has already jeopardized the anonymity of leakers at a site where he worked?"
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Firefox

+ - Firefox overtakes IE in Europe ->

Submitted by mu22le
mu22le (766735) writes "According to figures from Statcounter firefox took 38.1% of European market share, while Internet Explorer's share slipped to 37.5%. "This appears to be happening because Google's Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share," Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter chief executive, said in a statement. Reuters thinks part of the problem might be the March 2009 agreement between the European Commission and Microsoft to allow European Union users a choice of browsers.

 "
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Space

+ - Ten-year-old Girl Discovers Supernova

Submitted by mvar
mvar (1386987) writes "Ten-year-old Kathryn Aurora Gray of Fredericton, New Brunswick under the watch of astronomers, Paul
Gray and David Lane, are pleased to report the discovery of a magnitude 17 supernova in galaxy UGC 3378
in the constellation of Camelopardalis, as reported on IAU Electronic Telegram 2618. The galaxy was imaged
on New Year's Eve 2010, and the supernova was discovered on January 2, 2011 by Kathryn Aurora Gray and
Paul Gray.

The official announcement here (pdf)"

+ - Doctor marries Doctor's daughter, exploding TARDIS->

Submitted by techmuse
techmuse (160085) writes "In a veritable Who's Who of Doctor Who, 10th Doctor David Tennant is marrying Georgia Moffett, the daughter of 5th Doctor Peter Davison, who played the Doctor's daughter in an episode of Doctor Who. Except that the Doctor's daughter was a clone of the Doctor, which meant that she really was Who. So a newer Doctor is marrying an older Doctor's daughter, who is a clone of the newer doctor, but only has half the DNA of the older Doctor."
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Earth

+ - Evolution Fails More Often than it Succeeds

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes "Olivia Judson writes in the NY Times about the illusion that evolution is more powerful than it is because we keep studying evolutionary rescues, not evolutionary failures and are misled by laboratory experiments on the resilience of species. "Whether a population can evolve to cope with new circumstances depends on how much underlying genetic variation there is: do any individuals in the population have the genes to cope, even barely, with the new environment, or not?" writes Judson. "If not, everybody dies, and it's game over." Judson posits a population of algae living for generations in a comfy freshwater pool where due to a ghastly accident the pool becomes super-salty. Will the algae evolve and survive? "If the population immediately goes extinct, you have no experiment (at least, not one you can publish)." Judson adds that where no previous capacity exists, evolving a brand new trait can be a slow and haphazard affair and writes that in one noted case it took bacteria 31,000 generations to evolve the capacity to process an alternative food source. "If most organisms have to wait 31,000 generations to evolve a useful new trait they will probably go extinct first. Worse, many natural populations are shrinking fast, further reducing their evolutionary potential. In short, we can expect that if the environment continues to change as rapidly as it is at the moment many creatures will fail to meet their evolve-by dates.""
Apple

+ - Scientist 100% confident of finding Higgs boson->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "CNet has interviewed a particle physicist based at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN who gives some insight into what it's like to work there. The place smells of gamers and there's no chance of black holes wiping us out or time travel, plus he's convinced they will find the Higgs boson. All the scientist use Macs too, while computers in the control room are Linux-based."
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Politics

+ - Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize-> 3

Submitted by
AbbeyRoad
AbbeyRoad writes "OSLO (Reuters) — U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for giving the world "hope for a better future" and striving for nuclear disarmament. ... The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.""
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+ - Penny-Sized Nuclear Batteries Developed 1

Submitted by pickens
pickens (49171) writes "Pickens writes:

Nuclear batteries that produce energy from the decay of radioisotopes are an attractive proposition for many applications because the isotopes that power them can provide a useful amount of current for hundreds of years at power densities a million times as high as standard batteries. Although nuclear batteries have been used for military and aerospace applications for years their large size has limited their general usage but now a research team at the University of Missouri team has developed a nuclear battery the size of a penny that could be used to power micro- and nano-electromechanical systems. The researchers' innovation is not only in the battery's size, but also that the batteries use a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor. "The critical part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure of the solid semiconductor," says Jae Wan Kwon. "By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem." The batteries are safe under normal operating conditions. "People hear the word 'nuclear' and think of something very dangerous," says Kwon. "However, nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pacemakers, space satellites and underwater systems.""

Work expands to fill the time available. -- Cyril Northcote Parkinson, "The Economist", 1955

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