
Cancer-causing chemicals and drugs like antibiotics pollute many lakes, rivers and drinking water supplies. Activated carbon filters can remove about 40 percent of carcinogens and antibiotics from these waters. But a tiny solar-powered filter made of two bacterial proteins absorbs more than 50 percent more of the pollutants.
Russian scientists say they might have found new life forms in a fresh-water Antarctic lake that has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years. Bacterial DNA was discovered in samples of water the Russians took from Lake Vostok last year, when they finally broke through nearly four kilometers of Antarctic ice after a decade of intermittent drilling.
The colorful creature boasts a leg span of up to 20 centimeters across and belongs to the genus Poecilotheria. Spiders in this genus are known as tiger spiders because of their ornate markings. The new spider has been given the name Poecilotheria rajaei and differs from other spiders in the category mostly because of leg markings and a pink band on its abdomen.
At Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute, a chimpanzee named Ayumu is performing a task that is impossible for a person to do, revealing how chimp cognition can mirror - and in some cases surpass - the capabilities of the human brain.
Scientists in Norway have developed an app that is similar to a program psychologists use in the lab to measure brain function. A listener hears two different syllables in each ear at the same time, and says which one sounds the clearest. According to research team member Josef Bless, "the test indicates which side of the brain is most active during language processing."
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 The ability to learn a second language may depend less on linguistic skills and more on the ability to recognize patterns, according to new research. In the study, researchers used different tasks to measure how American students recognized the structure of words and sounds in Hebrew. The students were tested in two consecutive semesters.

Doctors from Mumbai, India are reporting success in cutting the number of cervical cancer deaths using a simple household staple -- vinegar. Presenting their study at a conference in Chicago Sunday, the doctors say they were able to cut the number of deaths by 31 percent in their study involving 150,000 women.
Coffee lovers have another reason to rejoice as a new study claims that regular consumption of the popular beverage can reduce the risk of a rare but serious liver disease. According to research published by the Mayo Clinic, coffee intake can lower the chance of contracting primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), an autoimmune liver disease. The disease can lead to cirrhosis of the liver, liver failure and biliary cancer.
U.S. officials have decided to make an emergency contraceptive pill available to women 15 years and older without a prescription. The Food and Drug Administration ruled that the Plan B One-Step be available to anyone who can show proof of age.

U.S. officials are warning that flight delays will be widespread as the full effect of the furlough of the government's air traffic controllers takes hold. The air safety agency's 47,000 employers - about a third of them air traffic controllers - are being furloughed without pay one day every two weeks for the next several months, as part of a plan to cut the government's chronic budget deficits.
Spain says its economy is worsening and that it will take two years longer than first thought to meet Europe's deficit target. At the same time, Spain - the fourth largest economy in the euro currency bloc - said its deficit would fall this year to 6.3 percent of its national economy. That is a sharp improvement over last year, but still more than double the three percent target set by the European Union. Spain said it would not meet the European target until 2016, two years later than promised in 2012.
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 Scientists have succeeded in bringing back to life plants that have spent more than 400 years under a glacier. The plants known as bryophytes, more commonly known as mosses and liverworts, were left behind by retreating glaciers and are thought to be between 400 and 600 years old. The finding overturns the long-held assumption that plants exposed by shrinking glaciers are dead.
 Twenty vials of moon rock and lunar soil collected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo 11 moon landing mission in 1969 have been found in a warehouse at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. NASA has asked for the samples to be returned.
 The Moon and Earth share the same source of water, according to new research. The latest analysis is based on new data collected by NASA spacecraft as well as the Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions. It shows that water inside the Moon’s mantle comes from primitive meteorites, which also supplied most of the water on Earth.
 Scientists have successfully transplanted human stem cells into brain-damaged mice and helped them recover their memory and learning skills. The study was carried out by Dr. Su-Chun Zhang, a professor of neuroscience and neurology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
 Scientist say they may have evidence of dark matter, the theoretical substance that holds the cosmos together, but has never been observed directly. During a news briefing Wednesday in Washington, scientists from the U.S. space agency, NASA, and the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, said a $2 billion cosmic ray detector on the International Space Station has found what they call a "footprint" of something that could be dark matter.

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Nutrition Facts DataBase
NutriBase is the largest Nutrition Facts DataBase, offering free, clear and accurate information for more than 7,000 food products. Use it to find out the content of Vitamins, Minerals, Energy, Dietary Fiber, Cholesterol, Fatty Acids and other nutrients for a lot of common and not-so-common foods.
How to search foods:
• Insert one to three words, and then click Search; you will get the list of foods containing these words;
• At least one of the words should have more than three letters; don't insert punctuation (allowed characters are letters, numbers, space and hyphen).
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Finance
Key ECB Interest Rates, effective from May 08, 2013


Business Asian markets tense before Fed; Nikkei outperforms SYDNEY (Reuters) - Japanese stocks rose on Wednesday, thanks to a positive lead from Wall Street and a softer yen, outperforming the rest of Asia which anxiously waited for clarity on the U.S. Federal Reserve's next policy step.
Fed seen keeping options open on pace of bond buying WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve policymakers will likely announce on Wednesday that they will keep buying bonds at a monthly pace of $85 billion, while keeping their options open to scale back the program later this year if the U.S. labor market continues to improve.
Asia business sentiment rises in second quarter, global growth risk still dominates SEOUL (Reuters) - Asia's top companies have become more optimistic about their business outlook with the retail and shipping industries rebounding sharply in the second quarter of 2013, the latest Thomson Reuters/INSEAD Asia Business Sentiment Survey shows.
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Politics Obama to set new goals to cut nuclear weapons: senior official BERLIN (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will say on Wednesday he will pursue a new reduction in deployed nuclear weapons by up to a third below the level achieved in the "New START" treaty with Russia, a senior administration official said.
North Korean envoy in Beijing seeking to mend ties: experts BEIJING (Reuters) - A North Korean envoy held talks with Chinese officials on Wednesday that experts said were unlikely to yield concessions from Pyongyang on its nuclear program but were more aimed at repairing ties with Beijing.
Dozens held in Turkey, silent protester goes viral ISTANBUL/ANKARA (Reuters) - A lone, silent vigil by a man in Istanbul inspired copycat protests on Tuesday, as police detained dozens of people across Turkey in an operation linked to three weeks of often violent demonstrations against Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.
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