Officials in Rick Perry's home state of Texas have set off a scientists' revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state's environmental agency.

"Some sections of the society use these sperm for ritual purposes. The thinking is that it can be used for regeneration of life since they are source of life (biologically).

"It's like Noah's ark, like, wrecking right here in Zanesville, Ohio," said Jack Hanna, former director of the Columbus Zoo. "Noah's ark filled with tigers and lions and leopards and a few monkeys and whatever, and it crashes here and all of a sudden they're out there."

The standoff began in mid-October and has once again heightened tensions in a severely overcrowded prison system where guns and drugs are commonplace and where protesting inmates have periodically seized hostages as bargaining chips.

President Hugo Chavez's government has recognized prison crowding as a problem, and a newly appointed prisons minister, Iris Varela, has pledged to come up with solutions. The countries' more than 30 prisons were designed to hold about 12,000 prisoners but are currently packed with about 47,000 inmates, according to official figures.

Last year, 476 people died and 967 were injured in prison violence, according to figures compiled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions — and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem — are simply not absorbed.

In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.

Scientists said Tuesday they had transformed age-worn cells in people over 90 -- including a centenarian -- into rejuvenated stemcells that were "indistinguishable" from those found in embryos.

Although calorie restriction has been shown to slow the aging process, delay the development of age-related diseases and have favorable effects on health, researchers have had a hard time explaining why this is so. Using yeast as a model, researchers at the University of Gothenburg have successfully identified that active peroxiredoxin 1 (Prx1), an enzyme that breaks down harmful hydrogen peroxide in the cells, is required for caloric restriction to work effectively.

The research team's study showed that Prx1 is damaged during aging and loses its activity but caloric restriction counteracts this by increasing the production of another enzyme called Srx1, which repairs Prx1. In potentially good news for those that like their food, the team also found that aging can be delayed without caloric restriction by increasing the quantity of Srx1 in the cell.

"Impaired Prx1 function leads to various types of genetic defects and cancer. Conversely, we can now speculate whether increased repair of Prx1 during aging can counteract, or at least delay, the development of cancer," said Mikael Molin of the University of Gothenburg's Department of Cell and Molecular Biology.

The researchers say that it has also been shown that peroxiredoxins are capable of preventing proteins from being damaged and aggregating, a process that has been linked to several age-related disorders affecting the nervous system, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Therefore, they are also considering whether stimulation of Prx1 can reduce and delay such disease processes.

Worried they might return with provocative tales of a populist uprising that just toppled another Middle East dictator, strongman Kim Jong Il has issued a decree to North Koreans in Libya –- don’t bother coming home.
The ban was an effort to prevent word of the often-violent Arab uprisings from reaching the isolated regime, illustrating Kim’s concern about potential social unrest at home inspired by the Arab Spring revolutions, according to stories published in the South Korean press.

Once the couple shot and gutted the horse, 21-year-old Elizabeth took off her clothing, climbed inside the carcass and took photos. After posting them online, the couple was met with an avalanche of criticism that lead to a police investigation for animal cruelty.
As well as photos of Elizabeth inside the horse's body, there are many others, one of which appears to depict the couple posing with the animal's heart.

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.

The control unit, valves and compressor pump that provide the means of locomotion are located in the robot's body, which can also be fitted with various measuring devices and sensors, depending on the job at hand.

Instead of producing the robot using conventional mechanical-engineering technologies, the Fraunhofer team turned to a 3D printing process called selective laser sintering (SLS) that sees thin layers of a polyamide powder applied one at a time and melted into place using a laser. Not only does this process allow complex geometries and inner structures to be produced, but the resulting robot is also very lightweight and cheap to produce.

"We can use SLS to produce one or even several legs in a single operation; this minimizes assembly effort, saves materials and reduces the time it takes to build a robot. With the modular approach, individual parts can be quickly swapped as well. Our robot is so cheap to produce that it can be discarded after being used just once - like a disposable rubber glove," says Ralf Becker, a scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA).

Although the spiderbot is still just a prototype, the researchers envision it could be used to explore environments that are hazardous or too difficult to access for humans, such as natural disaster areas and industrial or reactor accident sites. It could also be used to assist first responders and fire departments by broadcasting live images or tracking down hazards or leaking gas.

Visual artist and designer Jae Rhim Lee talks about the burial death suit designed for environmentally friendly burials.