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December 20, 2012 Friday comes the End of the World, the Mayan Way. This is a column about the End of the World, My Way. Mine is not a calendar-based finish. It's noisier, scarier and I've got a video.

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December 20, 2012 Many health experts say we should eat less salt, but that's not easy. Salt is added to almost everything that we cook or bake. Are we born with a taste for that much salt, or do we just like what we've always eaten? Scientists say it's some of both.

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December 19, 2012 You are on the cold ocean, staring at a thin sheet of ice, when suddenly, from literally out of the air, beautiful flowerlike objects start growing in front of you. The sea has become a meadow. But those strange "flowers" have a secret.

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December 18, 2012 More than 100 federally owned primates have been the subject of controversy. In 2010, the National Institutes of Health made arrangements to move some retired chimpanzees back into the research, spurring protests. But the NIH eventually decided to accept an independent assessment that found there is almost no scientific need for chimps in biomedical research.

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December 18, 2012 If you've ever wanted to eat a replica of the Mars rover Curiosity that made history this summer, here's your chance. A Caltech chef made one out of gingerbread, and it's on display in the lobby of the Athenaeum, a faculty and staff club on the Caltech campus.

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December 18, 2012 On Tuesday, the National Institutes of Health in Maryland is holding a second day of talks about whether and how to continue funding some controversial scientific experiments. Back in January, virologists agreed to temporarily stop research that was creating new forms of bird flu, because critics argued that the work was too dangerous.

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December 17, 2012 Secretions from a brown frog's skin contain chemicals that might be useful in fighting bacteria. Russian researchers are cataloging compounds in the slimy goo. Although the odds against them are long, the researchers hope their work will aid the search for new drugs.

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December 17, 2012 The two washing machine-sized probes have been collecting data from the lunar surface down to the core. NASA ended the mission by flying the spacecrafts into the side of a mountain on the moon.

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December 17, 2012 Start with a pool of oil. Turn on a magnet. The oil travels up a superstructure and blossoms into a tree. Turn off the magnet, and the branches, the needles, the tree melt away. It's a puddle again.The perfect tree for an oil billionaire, no?

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December 17, 2012 Gin, Jesuit priests, communist bravado — the history of malaria is littered with strange bedfellows, as our video shows. The parasite has proved to be a wily foe, frustrating human efforts to control it time and time again.

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December 15, 2012 Empty, forgotten, forlorn — the curbside recycling bin can seem like a sort of existential low point for all those soda bottles, tin cans, egg cartons and other containers whose contents we consume. But then – voila! Sorted for recycling, they become a thing of beauty.

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December 14, 2012 Mariner 2's 1962 mission to Venus was the first time any spacecraft had gone to another planet. Before the mission, very little was known about the planets, and much of what was believed to be true turned out to be wrong.

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