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Charlotte Wyatt, who has serious brain, lung and kidney damage, weighed only 1 pound and measured just 5 inches when she was born three months prematurely on October 14, 2003. The child hit the headlines soon after birth as her parents battled in the courts to force doctors – against their medical judgement – to provide artificial ventilation if her condition worsened. Her parents won the year-long legal dispute, which cost the taxpayer an estimated £500,000 ($929,000). In addition, the girl’s medical treatment costs around £300 a day, and has totalled an estimated £1.1 million so far. ... Charlotte’s parents...

The famous Australian-American actor, director and producer has been arrested at his residence today on terrorism charges. The details are still coming in at this time. ... According to sources in the Los Angeles Division of the FBI, Mel Gibson had been funneling money through Australia, where Gibson had lived for many years, into Lebanon and Palestine to help Muslim Extremists fight against Israel. Some of the money went to groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, no word on if any had been funneled to Al-Qaeda.

Nuclear reactors could be built more efficiently using supercomputers to artificially "evolve" designs, say engineers from the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. They have found they can speed up the extremely complex process of designing a reactor and generate novel designs from scratch by simulating natural selection. Designing a nuclear reactor normally involves input from various specialists and the resulting structure can be uniquely influenced by this collaborative process. "The design that comes out of this lengthy process is typically sub-optimal," says Louis Qualls, a nuclear systems specialist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "If you...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is giving astronomers their most detailed view yet of a second red spot emerging on Jupiter. For the first time in history, astronomers have witnessed the birth of a new red spot on the giant planet, which is located half a billion miles away. The storm is roughly one-half the diameter of its bigger and legendary cousin, the Great Red Spot. Researchers suggest that the new spot may be related to a possible major climate change in Jupiter's atmosphere. These images were taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys on April 8 and 16, 2006

"IT'S the wild west of evolution and ecology," says Joel Brown, an ecologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Evolution is operating with a vengeance in the urban environment as animals struggle to adapt to novel conditions and cope with "evolutionary illusions". An animal is said to be in an evolutionary illusion or trap when it does something it has evolved to do, but at the wrong time or in the wrong place. The concept may help explain why so many squirrels get squashed on city streets, says Brown. For millions of years, squirrels have evolved to cross open...

Five youths were killed when a large metal cross where they were praying was struck by lightning in central Mexico, local media reported. The five ranged in age from 9 to 16 years old.

I'm looking to gather together photos from the early illegal immigrant rallies. You know the ones.... where they were *honest* and were waving racist/anti-American banners and Mexican flags and burning US flags and the like. Please post links to sites that might have such photos, or post photos themselves. It would be best to *not* lose these resources.

... A new procedure pioneered at Wake Forest University in North Carolina has apparently solved the problem for Kaitlyne and six other patients. Scientists grew new bladders from the patients' own cells, which were then transplanted back into the patients' bodies. .... In the new procedure, doctors extract muscle and bladder cells from a small piece of the patient's own bladder. The cells are grown in a Petri dish, then layered onto a three-dimensional mold shaped like a bladder. In a few weeks, the cells produce a new bladder, which is implanted into the patient. Within a few more weeks,...

Bible proves Earth is center of universe, author argues The Earth is at the center of Robert Sungenis' universe. Literally. Yours too, he says. Sungenis is a geocentrist. He contends the sun orbits the Earth instead of vice versa. He says physics and the Bible show that the vastness of space revolves around us; that we're at the center of everything, on a planet that does not rotate. He has just completed a 1,000-page tome, "Galileo Was Wrong," the first in a pair of books he hopes will persuade readers to "give Scripture its due place, and show that science...

On Wednesday's ninth-season debut, Hayes' character, Chef, pops up in an episode which creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are devoting to his mysterious return to "South Park." They are expected to poke fun at his religion, Scientology. While details are scarce, Comedy Central officials say the duo are putting the finishing touches on the episode (Wednesday, 10 p.m.) -- which, like many others, is being written and animated in less than a week.

A huge step up from NASA administrator's 'Apollo on steroids' tag, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) has been christened 'Altair' - named after a variable double star in the constellation Aquila. ... Greek mythology comes into play for the LSAM (Lunar Surface Ascent Module), which receives the name 'Artemis' - the virgin goddess of the hunt and the moon. Fittingly, Artemis is also the twin sister of Apollo. ... The Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) gains the name 'Ares I' - as NASA's name choices move into a historical parallel with the previous launch vehicles to take astronauts to the moon....

George Deutsch, Up and Coming PAO Politico NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness, NY Times "In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times." "... The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A...

AN elderly man, his son-in-law and their wives are recovering in a French hospital after a home-made rocket-launcher the men were tinkering with exploded in the basement of a house, emergency services said. The man, aged in his 60s, lost a hand and his son-in-law, aged 40, suffered serious leg injuries in the explosion Sunday in a villa near Aubagne, east of the Mediterranean port city of Marseilles. The two women were also suffering from shock. The men appeared to have been working on a rocket in their basement, an investigator said. An explosives team was brought in to neutralise...

Post your reviews about books on Islam that you've read!

If New Orleans is rebuilt jsut where it is, it will always risk flooding. Well... how about they work *with* that? Instead of streets, have water-filled canals. Boats instead of cars. Homes and buildings on stone pillars to get 'em above the water, but surrounded *by* water. Heck, might even spur on development of practical amphbious family cars.

The N55 ROCKET SYSTEM enables persons to communicate their protest in a concrete way. It is a low tech, low cost, highly efficient hybrid rocket propulsion system, fueled by a mixture of polyethylene and laughing gas (N2O). The N55 ROCKET SYSTEM makes it possible to distribute various things from high altitudes. For example, printed matter or plant seeds could be spread over a vast area.The rocket PROTEST, constructed to protest against large concentrations of power, can carry a payload of 2 kg to an altitude of approximately 5200 m, if launched from an angle of 85 degrees. The fuel will...

The first official presentation of the ORIZONT vehicle took place in the Constitution Place. For the first time, the general public and media was informed about this vehicle, may be the most important private European initiative in the field of manned space flight.

The major and minor articles are done; now I'm just wrapping things up and doing final editting. This issue will be more than three times larger than normal; as a consequence, it will cost more to print and ship. I hope to get it to the printer by the end of the week. To help pay for the printing cost, I'm selling them in advance for lower than the full price: $14 each (for US orders) rather than $18, which will be the price for US orders after they are printed (that might go up, depending...). The three main articels...

... Whatever the reason, being a nerd, a geek, a dork -- whatever you want to call the tragically unhip -- is becoming a source of pride. ... And, increasingly, people are parading around in shirts that say "Dork Pride!" among other things. Such items have gotten so popular that CafePress.com, an online merchandiser, has created a special category for shirts and other items celebrating geeks, dorks and nerds. ... For now, though, he's going with it and has put a bumper sticker on his motorcycle that says "Talk Nerdy To Me" so he attracts the kind of women he's...

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (AP) -- The Discovery Channel will air a re-creation of the terrorist hijacking of Flight 93 on the fourth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The program will be called "The Flight That Fought Back" and will include about 45 minutes of re-created scenes depicting what happened before the plane crashed in a Southwestern Pennsylvania field. Forty passengers and crew members were killed.