3 Dead After Attack at Wyo. Community College

Three people are dead after an attack at Casper College, a Wyoming community college, that may have involved a type of bow and arrow.The college was shut down Friday morning after the attack."Emergency Alert: All classes and activities are cancelled today," read a message posted on the school's website.Initial calls came in just after 9 a.m. reporting a "traumatic injury" on...

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Projections of sea level rise are vast underestimates

Expect more water to lap at your shores. That's the take-home message from two studies out this week that look at the latest data on sea level rise due to climate change. The first shows that current projections for the end of the...

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Euro benefits from US 'fiscal cliff' hopes

NEW YORK: The euro rose against the dollar Thursday, boosted by hopes that US politicians will find a compromise to avoid the year-end "fiscal cliff" that could jolt the economy into recession.With investors' appetite for risk whetted, the euro bought $1.2978 at 2200 GMT, up from $1.2939 at the same time Wednesday.The European unit rose against the Japanese currency, to 106.58 yen from...

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Facebook: We're not getting into the game business.

Zynga just can't catch a break.After the stock market closed today, the teetering game maker revealed that it amended its contract with Facebook -- the company on which Zynga was entirely built -- and the details are already spooking Wall Street. In after-hours trading, shares of Zynga are down more than 10 percent to around $2.35.The concern? A line at the bottom of the SEC doc that says that Facebook...

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Pictures: Inside the World's Most Powerful Laser

Photograph courtesy Damien Jemison, LLNLLooking like a portal to a science fiction movie, preamplifiers line a corridor at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF).Preamplifiers work by increasing the energy of laser beams—up to ten billion times—before these beams reach the facility's target chamber.The project's lasers are tackling "one of physics' grand...

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Palestinians Win Statehood Status at U.N.

The U.N. General Assembly voted today to approve Palestinians' request to be upgraded to a "non-member observer state," defying opposition by the U.S. and Israel.Before the vote, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the General Assembly that it "is being asked today to issue the birth certificate of Palestine."Of the 193 countries in the General Assembly 138 voted to recognize...

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Today on New Scientist: 28 November 2012

Out-of-proportion black hole is a rare cosmic fossil A fairly small galaxy is host to a strangely enormous black hole, which could be a remnant of a quasar from the dawn of timeFlowing lithium atoms form accidental transistor A transistor that controls the flow of atoms, rather than electrons, could be used as a model to probe the mysterious electrical property of superconductivityEurope in...

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No progress in cliff talks leave dollar-euro flat

NEW YORK: The dollar traded flat against the euro Wednesday after a slight push higher mid-session, as talks continued in Washington on averting the economy-crunching fiscal cliff.At 2200 GMT, the euro bought $1.2939, a hair off the level at the same time Tuesday.Just hours earlier, the euro fell to $1.2881 before rebounding, the swings apparently related to perceptions over whether the...

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This quadrotor flies -- and rolls -- over just about anything

The cage rotates independently of the central rotor unit in this simple design.(Credit:Illinois Institute of Technology)We've seen how flying quadrotors can form spectacular displays in the sky, but what if they could roll along the ground too?Engineers at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Robotics Lab have been developing a power-efficient machine that can move on land and air. It also happens...

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Black Hole Blast Biggest Ever Recorded

Astronomers have witnessed a record-breaking blast of gas and dust flowing out of a monster black hole more than 11.5 billion light-years away.The supermassive gravity well, with a mass of one to three billion suns, lurks at the core of a quasar—a class of extremely bright and energetic galaxies—dubbed SDSS J1106 1939. (See "Black Hole Blasts Superheated Early Universe.")"We discovered...

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