Learning

Did you miss NASA/Star Trek G+ Hangout Thursday? Here's a shortened, 5-minute version:

The bombings extend one of the most sustained bouts of sectarian violence.

Hong Kong on Monday launched a ten-year plan to reduce waste by 40 percent per person as part of efforts to catch up with other leading Asian cities and avert a looming environmental crisis.

(Phys.org) —Entanglement, by general consensus of physicists, is the weirdest part of quantum science. To say that two particles, A and B, are entangled means that they are actually two parts of an inseparable quantum thing. An important consequence of this inherent kinship is that measuring a property of A (say, the particle's polarization) is necessarily to know the corresponding property of B, even if you're not there with a detector to observe B and even if (as explained below) the existence of that property had no prior fixed value until the moment particle A was detected.

(Phys.org) —The Amazon rain forest, popularly known as the lungs of the planet, inhales carbon dioxide as it exudes oxygen. Plants use carbon dioxide from the air to grow parts that eventually fall to the ground to decompose or get washed away by the region's plentiful rainfall.

The miniaturization of electronics continues to create unprecedented capabilities in computer and communications applications, enabling handheld wireless devices with tremendous computing performance operating on battery power. This same miniaturization of electronic systems is also creating new opportunities in biotechnology and biophysics.

(Phys.org) —Imagine a bendable tablet computer or an electronic newspaper that could fold to fit in a pocket.

In the United States, rivers and their floodplains are well-documented and monitored. Ecuador's largest river, however, remains largely mysterious. Research led by Michigan State University is helping the South American country unravel the Napo River's mystique to better balance its economic and environmental treasures.

Fifteen years of research at the University of California, Davis, is being turned into commercial products by Dysonics, a startup company based in San Francisco. Since becoming the first "graduate" from the Engineering Translational Technology Center, a technology incubator at the UC Davis College of Engineering, Dysonics has launched an iPhone app and is developing a broad product range for future launch. The company currently has 10 employees.

Unilever claimed bragging rights Monday to the most-watched Internet commercial of all time—a three-minute study of women's self-perception that stars a forensic artist.