Новости за 02.11.2010

Last week an account going by the name @PeaceKaren_25 was suspended by Twitter.com. We wouldn't normally care about some spambot getting picked off, but PeaceKaren is important because she wasn't peddling porn or popups--she was a political puppet. Karen and her sister account @HopeMarie_25 are examples of political "astroturf," fake Twitter accounts that create the illusion of a "grassroots" political movement. In the diagram above, the two accounts are connected by a very thick band, which in

The Martian rovers and orbiters have sent so much data back to Earth in the last few years that discoveries about Mars' wet and active past come left and right. Yesterday we covered the story that the stuck Spirit rover may have found evidence of recent water right under its tracks. And another study this week, out in Nature Geoscience, pinpoints a spot by a Mars volcano that could contain evidence of a watery system more than 3 billion years old—and perhaps even life, too. The finding came aft

From Ed Yong: Imagine taking a course of antibiotics and suddenly finding that your sexual preferences have changed. Individuals who you once found attractive no longer have that special allure. That may sound far-fetched, but some fruit flies at Tel Aviv University have just gone through that very experience. They’re part of some fascinating experiments by Gil Sharon, who has shown that the bacteria inside the flies’ guts can actually shape their sexual choices. The guts of all kinds of animals

Today, video games have their day in court. The Supreme Court is going to hear arguments of a California law meant to restrict the sale of extremely violent video games to minors, and to punish those who do so by fine. A 2005 California law prohibits selling or renting such games to minors based on legislative findings that they stimulate "feelings of aggression," reduce "activity in the frontal lobes of the brain" and promote "violent antisocial or aggressive behavior." The law never took effec

Gareth Bale claims Tottenham can cause a real shock and beat the Champions League holders Inter Milan at White Hart Lane. The two teams were involved in a classic European game at the San Siro the last time out, with Bale getting a stunning hat-trick as ten-man Spurs came from 4-0 down to go down […]

10 years ago today, Expedition 1 Commander Bill Shepherd and Flight Engineers Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko climbed aboard the International Space Station, marking the first of 3652 days of continuous occupation so far. I think that on that day a decade ago, we truly became a space-faring species. Since that day, 200 men and women from more than a dozen nations have stayed aboard the station, living there, playing there, working there, and yes, even doing some science there. I have such

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is teaming up with Scholastic (which makes bajillions off textbooks and Harry Potter) to produce an "energy" curriculum--one that neglects environmental consequences and climate change, at least in the materials presented so far (PDF). Scholastic also offers the "United States of Energy," another lesson plan/educational program "brought to you" in part by the American Coal Foundation. Meanwhile, in state after state, anti-evolutionists are arguing not only that we

From Ed Yong: The best poker players are masters of deception. They’re good at manipulating the actions of other players, while masking their own so that their lies become undetectable. But even the best deceivers have tells, and Meghana Bhatt from Baylor University has found some fascinating ones. By scanning the brains and studying the behaviour of volunteers playing a simple bargaining game, she has found different patterns of brain activity that correspond to different playing styles. These

Three times the plague has appeared in deadly force. And all three times, scientists have found, the disease-bearing bacteria originated in China and spread across the world through different routes. The plague's most famous appearance came as the Black Death in 14th century Europe, when it wiped out nearly a third of the population. But it also struck as the Justinian Plague in the Byzantine Empire of the 6th century, and a less severe outbreak spread around the world and reached the American