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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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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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