Sooty ships may be geoengineering by accident

GEOENGINEERING is being tested - albeit inadvertently - in the north Pacific. Soot from oil-burning ships is dumping about 1000 tonnes of soluble iron per year across 6 million square kilometres of ocean, new research has revealed. Fertilising the world's...

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Golf: Snedeker, Hahn share lead at Pebble Beach

PEBBLE BEACH, California: Brandt Snedeker, runner-up to Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson in the past two weeks, fired a four-under par 68 Saturday to share the lead after 54 holes at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.Snedeker, a 32-year-old American who won last year's PGA playoff crown, stood alongside Korean-American PGA rookie James Hahn on 12-under 202 through three rounds in quest of...

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LA Microsoft Store not mobbed, but Surface has a following

The Surface Pro(Credit:Brooke Crothers)LOS ANGELES -- The launch of the Surface Pro at the Microsoft Store in LA's Century City was a relatively low-key affair compared with the debut of the Surface RT. When I arrived just after 10 a.m. there was a small line (see photo). That said, both versions -- 64GB and 128GB -- of the Surface Pro had sold out immediately. Of course, no one would say how many...

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Mars Rover Curiosity Completes First Full Drill

For the first time in history, humans have drilled a hole into rock on Mars and are collecting the powdered results for analysis, NASA announced Saturday.After weeks of intensive planning, the Mars rover Curiosity undertook its first full drill on Friday, with NASA receiving images on Saturday showing that the procedure was a success.Curiosity drilled a hole that is a modest 2.5 inches...

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After Blizzard, Northeast Begins to Dig Out

The Northeast began the arduous process of cleaning up after a fierce storm swept through the region leaving behind up to three feet of snow in some areas.By early this morning, 650,000 homes and businesses were without power and at least five deaths were being blamed on the storm: three in Canada, one in New York and one in Connecticut, The Associated Press reported.The storm...

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Data-wiping algorithm cleans your cellphone

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondentMailing your cellphone to a recycling company might make you a few pounds, but it can leave you at risk of identity theft. The deletion techniques recycling companies use are meant for hard discs, and so don't work on the solid-state flash memory used in mobile phones. That means personal data like banking info, texts, contacts and pictures can end up in...

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Venezuela devalues currency 32% against US dollar

CARACAS: Venezuela said Friday it is devaluing its currency by 32 per cent against the dollar on the orders of cancer-stricken President Hugo Chavez, in part to trim a bloated budget deficit.The bolivar will go from 4.3 to 6.3 to the dollar at the official exchange rate. The move was announced at a press conference by Planning and Finance Minister Jorge Giordani. He said it will take effect...

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Yelp CEO takes $1 salary

Add Jeremy Stoppelman, chief executive of business reviews site Yelp, to the list of CEOs who are willing to work for $1. Stoppelman will take a $1 base salary for 2013, according to information in Yelp's 8-K document filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The itsy-bitsy take-home pay makes Stoppelman just like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, who have also preferred to work for just...

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Space Pictures This Week: Sun Dragon, Celestial Seagull

Solar DragonImage courtesy SDO/NASAResembling a dragon's tail, remnants of a solar filament strain to escape the sun's gravity in an image released this week by NASA's Solar Dynamics...

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'Stay Home': Northeast Shuts Down as Blizzard Hits

A blizzard of possibly historic proportions began battering the Northeast today, and could bring more than two feet of snow and strong winds that could shut down densely populated cities such as Boston and New York City.A storm from the west joined forces with one from the south to form a nor'easter that will sit and spin just off the East Coast, affecting more than 43 million...

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Robot inquisition keeps witnesses on the right track

MEMORY is a strange thing. Just using the verb "smash" in a question about a car crash instead of "bump" or "hit" causes witnesses to remember higher speeds and more serious damage. Known as the misinformation effect, it is a serious problem for police trying to gather accurate accounts of a potential crime. There's a way...

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Tennis: No Serena, no Sharapova in tweaked Fed Cup

PARIS: The 2013 Fed Cup World Group gets underway on Saturday with the tournament missing marquee names Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova and with a late format tweak aimed at boosting the event's appeal.Both Williams and Sharapova featured in the 2012 Fed Cup, partly to meet Olympic Games qualifying criteria, but will not be involved when the United States tackle Italy and Russia welcome...

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Top five Thunderbolt storage devices: Performance meets capacity

The Thunderbolt technology can be applied to a lot of things, but currently, the most popular use is in storage products. In this regard, it's similar to USB 3.0 but offers about twice the transfer speed, and you can also daisy-chain as many as five storage devices together using a single Thunderbolt port without degrading the data rates.Despite the fact that now Thunderbolt has gone multiplatform,...

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Asteroid to Make Closest Flyby in History

Talk about too close for comfort. In a rare cosmic encounter, an asteroid will barnstorm Earth next week, missing our planet by a mere 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers).Designated 2012 DA14, the space rock is approximately 150 feet (45 meters) across, and astronomers are certain it will zip harmlessly past our planet on February 15—but not before making history. It will pass within...

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Cop Shooting Rampage: Dorner's Truck Found

The truck owned and driven by suspected cop killer Christopher Dorner during his alleged rampage through the Los Angeles area was found deserted and in flames on the side of Bear Mountain, Calif., this afternoon.Heavily armed SWAT team members descended onto Bear Mountain from a helicopter manned with snipers today to investigate the fire. The San Bernadino Sheriff's Department...

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Today on New Scientist: 6 February 2013

Open Richard III DNA evidence for peer review A good case has been made that a skeleton unearthed from a car park is that of the last Plantagenet king of England - it's time to share the dataUniversal bug sensor takes guesswork out of diagnosis A machine that can identify all bacteria, viruses and fungi known to cause disease in humans should speed up diagnosis and help to reduce antibiotic...

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Canadians protest Tunisian opposition chief's death

MONTREAL: Hundreds of people gathered late Wednesday in Montreal to express their outrage over the shooting death of Tunisian opposition leader Chokri Belaid.The protesters, mostly youths, held candles and some wrapped themselves in Tunisian flags under bitterly cold temperatures.The Tunisian Collective of Canada, which backed the Arab Spring movement that triggered the fall of dictator...

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Tesla rolls out remote app for Model S

Tesla's new app will let Model S owners view their cars' charging status.(Credit:Tesla)When we reviewed the Tesla Model S, we came away very impressed by the driving character and the cabin electronics, but some features, common on other high-end or electric cars, were missing. Tesla made up for one of those features by making a smartphone app available that will let Model S owners view their battery...

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NTSB to Challenge 787 Battery Tests

The National Transportation Safety Board will publicly question at a news conference planned for Thursday morning in Washington whether the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing adequately tested the lithium batteries that have caught fire on Dreamliners in the U.S. and Japan, ABC News has learned exclusively from a government source.The NTSB will say its investigation...

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Today on New Scientist: 5 February 2013

Engineering light: Pull an image from nowhere A new generation of lenses could bring us better lighting, anti-forgery technology and novel movie projectors Baby boomers' health worse than their parents Americans who were born in the wake of the second world war have poorer health than the previous generation at the same ageNew 17-million-digit monster is largest known prime A distributed computing...

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