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World
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Should We Farm Rhino?
11 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 12 Comments
On the back of the dreadful news that eight rhino carcasses were found in the Kruger National Park within the space of 24 hours the day before yesterday, a South African columnist and well respected journalist has asked whether we should be farming rhino.
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‘Doomsday Clock’ Moved Closer To Midnight
11 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
I’d forgotten that this was something people still did! That metaphorical ‘Doomsday Clock,’ that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists uses to represent the threat of nuclear war, was moved to five minutes to midnight, the closest to doomsday it’s been since North Korea’s 2007 nuclear weapons test.
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iPad Survives 30km Drop From Space [VIDEO]
10 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 8 Comments
It’s nice that companies are willing to go to insane lengths to try and make us buy their things. Take G-Form, who wrapped up an Apple tablet in their ‘Extreme Edge’ case, and launched it into space on a weather balloon before dropping it back to earth to prove how extreme their case really is.
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Aussies Top The Charts In Dope And Meth Use: Study
10 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Those Aussies just need to be the best at everything, don’t they? Except, a British medical journal recently revealed that Australia and New Zealand also top the global charts for usage of marijuana and methamphetamine! Awkward!
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Saudi Businessman’s Son For Sale On Facebook For $20 Million
10 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
Instead of selling off some non-essential items like a TV or maybe a set of golf clubs when his financial situation became dire, a Saudi business man chose to sell his son. For $20 million.
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Greece Classes Pedophilia, Exhibitionism, And Kleptomania As Disabilities
10 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Greek disability groups expressed anger yesterday at a government decision to expand a list of state-recognized disability categories to include pedophiles, exhibitionists and kleptomaniacs. No news yet as to whether or not these people will also qualify for special parking close to schools, playgrounds, and shopping malls.
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Local French Government Bans The Word “Mademoiselle” Due To Sexism Claims
09 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Well, this is the fight against sexism taken to a whole new level. The word “Mademoiselle” has been banned from all official documents in the French suburb of Cesson-Sévigné, in Rennes. Formerly regarded simply as the title given to an unmarried woman, the term is now considered sexist, apparently.
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NASA Goes Open-Source
09 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
NASA has launched an open-source portal to make it easier for agencies to evaluate and improve upon its projects. The initial setup works as a simple directory of open-sourced projects in development, which is hoped to expand into a platform for tracking, hosting and planning the various pieces of software created by the American space agency.
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Epic Timelapse Of An Entire Hotel Built In Just 15 Days, Only In China [VIDEO]
09 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
China is at it again. When they’re not building war-machines, churning out electronics and manufacturing cars at the speed of light, they’re constructing 30-storey hotels in the time it usually takes to get your call answered by Telkom customer service.
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Nelson Mandela TV Series On The Horizon
09 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Nelson Mandela’s life story is to be turned into a television mini-series, entitled “Madiba”. Mandela has given his personal approval for a series that will follow six decades of his life, but there’s been no word yet as to whether or not Matt Damon or Morgan Freeman will be involved.
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Full Gallery Of Titanic Items To Be Sold 100 Years After Sinking (PICS)
06 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
The Titanic has been lying at the bottom of the ocean for nearly a century. On 15 April this year, 5 000 items from the world’s most famous shipwreck will be auctioned off in one lot – on the 100th anniversary of the disaster that took place on April 15, 1912. See some of them after the jump.
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Russian Satellite Will Fall To Earth Next Week
06 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Phobos-Grunt, the 13-ton, US$ 170 million Russian space probe that was launched into orbit and promptly crippled by failed auxiliary engines, is due to crash back onto Earth soon. Russian space authorities have named January 15th as the likely re-entry date. In case you thought that your fears of high-speed orbital debris ended with 2011.
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Facebook Timeline Used For Israeli Anti-Drug Campaign
06 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Whether you love it or hate it, Facebook’s new Timeline feature is here to say. Rather than jump on the bandwagon condemning the new feature, an Israeli ad agency used it to send a powerful anti-drug message.
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Rebekah Brooks Is In Cape Town
06 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Rebekah Brooks, the former News International chief, and News of the World editor, is enjoying a sabbatical in Cape Town. Cutting a notably different appearance from the fiery redhead we’re used to, the media mogul has been escaping the phone hacking and corruption scandal that’s followed her around for months.
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Pentagon Scientists Created A “Time Cloak” To Make Events Disappear
05 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Five days into 2012 and we’ve already got fancy new technology. A team from Cornell University have developed a light-distortion device that can mask events as if they hadn’t happened; they managed to use light distortion to hide an event for 40 picoseconds. Which, granted, is 40 trillionths of a second, but the research is groundbreaking in the extreme.
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Alien World Discovered Beneath Antarctica [VIDEO]
05 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Scientists researching previously unexplored deep-sea vents in Antarctica stumbled upon a host of new species, including hairy-chested crabs, ghostly octopus and predatory starfish, in what has since been dubbed a “lost world”.
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Saudi Women May Now Sell Lingerie – A Small Step Forward?
04 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Tomorrow will mark what many Saudi women will consider a small milestone in personal shopping. From this week, only female staff will be allowed to sell lingerie, relieving the embarrassment of buying underwear in the highly conservative Muslim nation. This is by order of the king, incidentally. The new law provides a rare opportunity for the employment of women, which was previously outlawed.
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Mitt Romney Wins Iowa Caucuses By Eight Votes
04 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
In one of the closest candidate-selection ballots in US history, former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney won out over Rick Santorum at the Iowa caucuses, the nation’s first major electoral event of the year. Santorum and Romney switched between first and second frequently during the night, but a last-minute eight-vote tie margin put Romney ahead.
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Bloggers Paid To Promote Google Chrome
04 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 2 Comments
Earlier this week it was revealed that there are literally hundreds of bloggers who were bribed to promote Google Chrome and to claim that their blog’s were “sponsored by Google”. Google’s response has been to point the finger at ad agencies.
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Salma Hayek Knighted In France
03 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy announced today that Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek will become a Chevalier – or Knight – of the Legion of Honour for her services to the French Republic. The news was not too well received by all, with some labeling the country’s honours system “a laughing stock.”
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Shell Is Refusing To Clean Up Its African Oil Spill
03 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
We covered the Shell Oil Spill when it happened almost two weeks ago. The facts are this: Royal Dutch Shell operates an offshore barreling facility 120km from the Nigerian coast. This was shut down by a spill on the 20th of December. Shell sent out five ships to contain the spill. Oil is now washing up on the Nigerian coast.
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Upcoming Apple Event To Revamp iBooks
03 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Apple is holding a product event later this month in New York – and since the Christmas buy-a-palooza is just past, it’s looking unlikely that they’re going to be announcing any new hardware just yet. Instead, Apple seems set to refurbish iBooks, their eBook retail platform, with a couple of new publishing options.
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Fearmongering Or Truth? A Super-Volcano Rumbling Beneath Europe Could Erupt At Any Moment
03 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
Super-volcanoes are a scary reality, capable of spewing billions of tons of ash and boiling hot magma upon eruption, it’s a good thing they only pop every 10 to 12 thousand years. Except when it’s been 12 900 years since its last eruption, which is currently the case.
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Iran Threatens To Take Military Action Against USA
03 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Iran’s army has warned that it will take action against America if a particular US aircraft carrier, which was moved due to naval exercises, returns to Iranian waters. The threat sounds far from empty, too.
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Roelof Van Der Merwe Faces Australian Drink Driving Charge
03 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
As South African cricketing legend, Jacques Kallis makes his 150th Test match appearance during the third Test against Sri Lanka at Newlands this week, another international South African cricketer faces a court appearance in Australia for failing a roadside breath test on New Year’s Day.
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The World’s Most Dangerous Airport
30 Dec 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
When you think of an airport you’re likely to conjure up images of wide open spaces, cordoned off for kilometres, free of any midair obstacles, and normally you’d be right on the money. However, perched between two 6km mountains, Paro Airport in Bhutan is anything but normal.
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Stephen Hawking Is Looking For An Assistant
30 Dec 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant scientists of our lifetime, and author of “A Brief History of Time”. And he is currently shopping around for a new assistant. His website features a picture of his wheelchair, complete with wires and complex electronics. The caption reads “STOP PRESS: Could you maintain this?”
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Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of 2011
29 Dec 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
It’s the 29th of December, which means we are all now sick of Top 10 lists. There are Top 10 lists of Top 10 list. Except this particular Top 10 list is actually pretty informative, collating the year’s illegal torrent data to tell us which films people wanted to see but weren’t willing to pay for. #1 is really awful.
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“Coke Tax” Approved In France
29 Dec 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Having taxes on the things that are bad for you is something everyone has to deal with. There’s tax on smoking, tax on booze, and tax on gambling. In a move to remove all the fun out of your life, the French government has now introduced a tax on sugary soft drinks.
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Japan Has Wi-Fi Vending Machines Now.
29 Dec 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Any article discussing some fun new tech in Japan is liable to be instantly out of date, because those guys have everything. Voice synthesizers, Olympic robots, eco-friendly Christmas lights – whatever. But this is new, and probably practical enough to port overseas: vending machines that sell Wi-Fi accessible within a 50m radius.
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