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CHINA must make the first nuclear strike against the US if Joe Biden continues to defend Taiwan, a top Chinese diplomat says. Beijing's former ambassador to the UN, Sha Zukang said the country's long-standing promise to only use nukes in retaliation should be re-examined in response to the new alliances forming in the region. He said: "The unconditional no first use is not suitable . . . unless China-US negotiations agree that neither side would use [nuclear weapons] first, or the US will no longer take any passive measures to undermine the effectiveness of China’s strategic forces. "The strategic pressure...

It is now an established practice in roughly 90% of the American media that anything that President Trump does is wrong, and usually an outrage. Thus, when he and Melania flew to Iraq and Germany for a post-Christmas visit to the troops deployed there, it had to be bad, a transparently craven reaction to criticisms that had started appearing in lefty media that he had not yet visited troops in a war zone – as all his recent predecessors had done -- as his first term in office neared its halfway point. Brit Hume, the senior commentator at Fox News,...

LEBANON, TN (WSMV) - (video at link) If a Lebanon inventor has his way, the bathroom experience may never be the same. Dave Reynolds thinks toilets should glow in the dark, and he's not joking. "I kept telling this story over and over to people and they laughed," Reynolds said. "And I said, 'One day you're not going to laugh at me. One day you're going to go to the bathroom and think of me.'" For Reynolds, a glow-in-the-dark toilet just makes sense. "Not right now, but at 3 in the morning, that's when it comes together," he said. "When...

Want to get pregnant? There's an app for that ... actually a few apps for that. And they are proving to be remarkably helpful. Want to avoid pregnancy? Kindara, an iPhone app created by a husband and wife team in Boulder, Colo., promises that it can be your birth control, too, letting women get off the pill. Kindara was released in 2012 to do a similar thing. But, unlike Glow, its founders say this app can now not only help a woman conceive, but also avoid pregnancy while allowing women to get off of hormone-based birth control like the pill,...

South Korean scientists have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene, a procedure which could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, officials said Wednesday. In a side-effect, the cloned cats glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams. A team of scientists led by Kong Il-keun, a cloning expert at Gyeongsang National University, produced three cats possessing altered fluorescence protein (RFP) genes, the Ministry of Science and Technology said. "It marked the first time in the world that cats with RFP genes have been cloned," the ministry said in a statement. "The ability to produce cloned cats...

Scientists have solved a decades-long mystery of a red glow that permeates our Milky Way Galaxy and other galaxies. The red glow is most prominent in a strange, dying star called the Red Rectangle, named for the bizarre structure that surrounds it. The red light, astronomers now say, radiates from invisibly small clusters of dust that are now believed to glow because of newly described molecular forces that oppose each other on very small scales. The glow, called the Extended Red Emission (conveniently ERE for short) has been known but inexplicable for more than 30 years. Researchers suspected carbon-rich molecules...

SAN DIEGO - The glow of planets outside our solar system have been spotted in the first direct detections of light emitted by alien worlds. The two planets were detected in infrared light, an emission of heat that is not visible to the human eye. There are no conventional photographs, but astronomers are ecstatic nonetheless. The gas giant worlds, each around a different star, were discovered previously by noting the gravitational wobbles they induce in their host stars -- an indirect method. Both are roughly Jupiter-sized and hot, orbiting very close to their stars. Each completes a "year" in less...

Nursing leaders today distanced themselves from saucy pictures of a scantily-clad "nurse" advertising lingerie. Model Luci Victoria, the new face of Ann Summers, was pictured wearing a white nurse uniform, with bright red underwear peaking out. Look here too! • Shop for lingerie here! Ann Summers is offering nurses a 25% discount on all its products tomorrow to mark International Nursing Day. But the Royal College of Nursing was not impressed with the pictures, likening them to the stereotyped image of nurses in the Carry On films. A spokeswoman said: "This Carry On image is out of touch with the...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 15 Aurora's Ring Credit & Copyright: Trygve Lindersen Explanation: Gusting solar winds and blasts of charged particles from the Sun made the early days of October rewarding ones for those anticipating auroras. While out enjoying the stormy space weather from Toemmeraas, Norway, Trygve Lindersen recorded this picturesque apparition of the northern lights with a digital camera on October 6. From this perspective, the curtains of green...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 August 25 Nebula Nova Cygni Turns On Credit: Peter Garnavich (Notre Dame), 1.2-m Telescope, Whipple Observatory Explanation: Old photographs show no evidence of the above nebula. In 1992, a white dwarf star toward the constellation of Cygnus blew off its outer layers in a classical nova explosion: an event called Nova Cygni 1992. Light flooded the local interstellar neighborhood, illuminated this existing gas cloud, excited the existing...