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This is the Lambda Centauri nebula, a star-forming cloud in our Milky Way galaxy, also known as the Running Chicken nebula.

Alpha Centauri Has a Planet

A newly discovered planet circling Alpha Centauri is only four light years away and could point the way to habitable planets nearby

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Picasso, Matisse and Monet Paintings Stolen From Dutch Museum

Seven paintings from some of Western art’s greatest masters went missing from a the Kunsthal Museum in Holland this morning

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To Increase Salmon Populations, Company Dumped 110 Tons of Iron Into the Pacific Ocean

Adding iron to the ocean can make life bloom, but scientists are uneasy about the potential unknown consequences

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Today We Celebrate a Woman Who Saw the Future of Computers

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day celebrating the life of Lady Lovelace, a seventeenth century countess who published a paper that might be the first computer program ever devised

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Should All Students Be Forced to Learn Computer Science?

Kids these days are computer wizzes, but they don’t actually know how computers work.

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Nobel Economists Looked at Finding The Best Deals When You Can’t Use Money

Two Americans explain how to best bring groups together

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Three Views of Felix Baumgartner’s Record-Breaking Skydive From the Stratosphere

At years of preparation and untold expense, Felix Baumgartner successfully leapt from 23.5 miles

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The Man Who Deserved ’66 Percent of the Credit’ for Cloning Dolly Has Died

Earlier this week Keith Campbell, one of the scientists responsible for Dolly, died at the age of 58

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Sounding Smart with SmartNews: Your Cheat Sheet to the Nobels

Here, in Twitter-sized bites, are descriptions of the work that won the Nobel this week

More Chocolate, More Nobels

Chocolate consumption statistically relates to Nobel Prizes

Bafflement Over the European Union’s Peace Prize Win

The European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize this morning, much to the dismay of many Europeans and Tweeters

Kenai lived to be 23, much longer than the 15-18 years of a typical sea otter.

Kenai the Sea Otter, Rescued From Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Has Died

One of the last two otters rescued from the Exxon Valdez oil spill has just passed away

Mo Yan and Chinese literature translator Howard Goldblatt speak at a literary festival.

China’s ‘Provocative and Vulgar’ Mo Yan Wins Nobel in Literature

Chinese author Mo Yan took this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature for his “hallucinatory realism”

This is not the lab in question.

Forensic Chemist Who Helped Put Hundreds in Jail Pleads the Fifth to Fraud Charges

What might have been be a standard academic fraud case is complicated by the fact that the scientist isn’t just any chemist, she’s a forensic chemist

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What’s Up With the Winds That Keep Grounding Felix Baumgartner’s Leap From the Stratosphere?

Getting the right weather conditions to launch may be one of the hardest parts of Felix Baumgartner’s 23-mile sky dive

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Report Suggests Armstrong Not Just a Doper But a Pusher

Sources close to Armstrong have come forward admitting that not only did he dope, but he was at the center of the doping world

The seven-segmented structure of a GPCR, the class of receptors at the heart of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Everyone Believed Cell Receptors Existed, But Chemistry Nobelists Figured Out That They Actually Did

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work that helped to figure out the functioning of cellular receptors

You don’t want this little guy in your brain.

Brain-Invading Amoebas Kill Ten in Pakistan

It’s Definitive: Rose and Jack Could Both Have Survived in Titanic

Perhaps Jack was just dumb for not climbing onto the raft

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Today’s Physics Nobel Prize Didn’t Go to the Higgs

The winning research centers around figuring out the way light behaves at a very fundamental level - a field called “quantum optics”

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