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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 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 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 There's no place for chronic misplacers of keys at the 21st World Memory Championships under way in London. About 75 competitors from some two dozen countries are vying to see who can memorize the most numbers, faces, playing cards or random words in a set amount of time in this "mnemonic Olympiad."

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December 12, 2012 Alzheimer's is the disease that creeps in and slowly erases what you know until, eventually, there's no more to erase. How this happens is still a mystery, but this short animation by Po Chou Chi tries to make poetic sense of what goes on.

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December 11, 2012 There you are, hanging with the other pigeons. It's a sunny day. Tranquil. You are taking a bird bath along a river's edge, when suddenly, leaping out of the water onto the land, straight at you — is a fish! A pigeon-eating catfish. (We've got pictures.)

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December 10, 2012 Dashboard video cameras are common in Russia. In case you get bumped into, or bump someone else, insurance companies want to see what happened. So we have a video record of what it's like to drive there. You don't want to see this compilation video. (Oh yes you do.)

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December 7, 2012 Where's the bus? It's supposed to be here by now, but it isn't. You crane your neck. Nothing. And then — miraculously — there's a solution. The bus still isn't here. But something else is.

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