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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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December 5, 2012 It's a tombstone like no other. A rough, clumpy hunk of granite, carried across Europe on a sea of ice, dumped in a valley, shipped across the Atlantic, lugged to Massachusetts — all to honor a restless man.

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December 4, 2012 "The President" is a 3,200-year-old giant sequoia that clocks in at 247 feet tall and counting. And contrary to most living things we can think of, giant sequoias grow faster later in life than earlier in life.

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December 1, 2012 What do singer Gotye, Chinese artist Liu Bolin and early 20th century painter Abbott Handerson Thayer have in common? (Here's a hint: Look very, very closely.)

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November 30, 2012 You can go to almost any cubic foot of ocean, stream, coral, backyard, ice shelves even, and if you look, you'll find scores of little animals and plants busy making a living. But here's a place — a beautiful, bountiful place — that when you look close — is a desert.

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