Palin and Fox Part Ways, but Is She Really Over?

Sarah Palin's break up with Fox News should not have been, well, breaking news, as she had publicly complained in August on Facebook that the network had canceled her appearances at the Republican National Convention. And going back even further, Palin didn't give Fox the scoop in October 2011 when she announced she wasn't going to run for president. Still, the news of the...

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Iran launches monkey into space

Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporterLast summer, the Iranian Space Agency announced their plan to send a monkey into space - and now they've apparently done it.According to Iranian state-run television, a press release on the space agency's website, and photos of the event, Iran sent a live rhesus monkey into sub-orbital space aboard a small rocket called Pishgam, or Pioneer. There's even a...

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Cycling: UCI disbands independent Armstrong commission

LONDON: The International Cycling Union (UCI) announced Monday it had disbanded the independent commission it had set up to investigate any alleged involvement by the global governing body in the Lance Armstrong doping scandal.The UCI said it had pulled the plug on the commission, which only met in public for the first time last week, because both the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and...

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Twitter acquires Crashlytics crash reporting service

Crashlytics announced that it has merged with Twitter.(Credit:Crashlytics)Twitter has bought Crashlytics, a startup whose crash reporting tool has been incorporated into a wide variety of iOS apps including Vine, Yelp, Kayak, TaskRabbit, and Waze.In a blog post today, Crashlytics co-founders Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang announced that the company is "joining the flock," the term often used when people...

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Urban Heat May Warm Faraway Places

The massive amounts of heat produced by cities may be heating up rural areas 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away, atmospheric researchers have found in a new modeling study.Scientists have long invoked the "urban island heat effect" to explain why cities are generally hotter than suburban and rural areas. More people, as well as more cars, houses, and paved surfaces, turn energy into heat,...

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Immigration Plan Includes Path to Citizenship

A bipartisan group of senators on Monday formally unveiled their proposal to drastically overhaul the nation's immigration system, with the hope of passing a bill out of the Senate by late spring or early summer."We believe this will be the year Congress finally gets it done," Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) one of the members of the so-called "Gang of Eight" said during a press conference...

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DNA privacy: don't flatter yourself

The secrets contained in our individual genomes are less valuable than we like to believe IMAGINE donating your DNA to a project aimed at discovering links between genes and diseases. You consent to your genome sequence being released anonymously into the public domain, though you are warned there is a remote possibility that it might...

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Fired workers protest at South Korean embassy in Iran

TEHRAN: Around 1,000 workers laid off by Iran's Entekhab group demonstrated outside the South Korean embassy in Tehran on Sunday after an acquisition deal for Daewoo Electronics fell through because of sanctions.Entekhab had to let them go when it shut down a manufacturing line, the company said.Three months ago, employees demonstrated at the embassy in the hope that Seoul would intervene...

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Pornographic video clips already showing up on Twitter's Vine

Less than a week after Twitter unveiled Vine, the video-sharing app apparently has developed a porn problem.Released Thursday, the app for iPhone and iPod Touch lets anyone create and share six-second clips, but it also has become a popular venue for male genitalia and pornographic movies taped off TVs and laptops. As first pointed out last night by The New York Times' Nick Bilton, searches for #porn,...

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Pictures: The Story Behind Sun Dogs, Penitent Ice, and More

Photograph by Art Wolfe, Getty ImagesIf you want the beauty of winter without having to brave the bone-chilling temperatures blasting much of the United States this week, snuggle into a soft blanket, grab a warm beverage, and curl up with some of these natural frozen wonders. Nieve penitente, or penitent snow, are collections of spires that resemble robed monks—or penitents. They are flattened columns...

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