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January 11, 2013 The oldest rock in the world isn't even a rock. It's a teeny grain, a zircon, found inside a bigger rock. But what it's telling us is huge. It's rewriting the early history of the planet.

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January 9, 2013 One of the country's speediest, most daring and dangerously tall climbers seems to be walking across the sky until his foot touches the moon's edge. But he doesn't stay for long.

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January 8, 2013 American men are at the top of their shirt-buying game in their early 50s. Then something drastic happens.

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January 5, 2013 This can't be. How does that big heavy rock stay pivoted on top of that itsy bitsy one, which is hanging precariously onto the one below? Yet they do. The beauty of balance.

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January 2, 2013 Here's an animal that's really, really old on our planet, a true survivor. But to keep going, it has been forced to move, over and over, till it has almost out of moves. The story of a bug that ran away from flowers and learned to live on ice.

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December 31, 2012 To a significant degree, you are the sum of the stories you tell yourself about yourself. Take away your memories, the connective tissue of your life, and what's left?

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December 25, 2012 Looking to film a winter movie scene in warm, sunny weather? Head out to marshes and collect cattails. Squeeze out the seeds, and voila!

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December 24, 2012 If you counted every good deed, every smile, every act of charity, then counted every growl, frown, kick and wrong, which would be greater? The good or the bad? Thinkers from John Locke to Martin Luther King, Jr., give insight on the progress of humanity.

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December 22, 2012 What if houses were warm-blooded and got cold in December like we do? Then, you'd do to them what we do to ourselves: you bundle them up in something warm.

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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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