The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun. Three reports: The AP , The Christian Science Monitor & The Daily Mail

According to movie and comic-book storylines, kryptonite is supposed to sap Superman's powers whenever he is exposed to its large green crystals. 

The real mineral is white and harmless, says Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum. 

"I'm afraid it's not green and it doesn't glow either - although it will react to ultraviolet light by fluorescing a pinkish-orange," he told BBC News. BBC

Now anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can zoom in on satellite images of any of the 1,600 devastated villages and get detailed information provided by the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington.

The Iranian representative at Unesco has logged a complaint and last week president Mahmood Ahmadinejad of Iran called the movie a psychological assault on the Iranian nation. The president may not be too accomplished at diplomatic niceties but he can spot a rabble-rouser from 300 paces. This, for the Iranians, is the equivalent of the Danish cartoons, but with go-faster stripes. 

The movie is a gore-fest of computer-generated special effects, based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller about the battle of Thermoplyae in 480 BC between the Persian empire and an alliance of Greek states. 

Of course, movies routinely take historical events out of context, and 300 doesn't disappoint in its avoidance of historical accuracy. The authors are on record as saying that this is a fantasy and not historical film-making, but they haven't explained why they have such racist fantasies. 

History or fantasy, 300 is an out-an-out racist diatribe worthy of contempt. I only need to refer you to Dana Stevens who wrote in her review for Slate: "If 300 had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war." Guardian 

In fact, the ancestral branches of most mammals, including primates, rodents and hoofed animals, emerged long before the global extinction and survived it more or less intact. But it was not until at least 10 million to 15 million years afterward that the lineages of living mammals began to flourish in number and diversity.

Some mammals did benefit from the extinction, but these were not closely related to extant lineages and most of them soon died off.

These are the surprising conclusions of a comprehensive study of molecular and fossil data on 4,510 of the 4,554 mammal species known to exist today. NYT (reg/req)

"A year ago my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my vice-president had shot someone. 

"Ah, those were the good ol' days," he said, to applause from the audience. BBC

Stranded villagers stared in bewilderment at dried out banks, and helicopters delivered food and water to isolated river communities. 

They were the images of the widespread drought in 2005 in the Amazon - an area of lush rainforest in most people's imagination. It was the worst in some areas since records began, and prompted the Brazilian government to declare a state of emergency. 

Nearly two years on, the world may have forgotten the drought, but the scientific community has not. Meeting at Oxford University this week, many of the world's leading experts on climate change and Amazonia have been grappling with issues critical to the future climate of the world.BBC

The findings are the most direct evidence that humans’ native revulsion to hurting others relies on a part of neural anatomy, one that evolved before the higher brain regions responsible for analysis and planning. NYT (reg/req)

"Theories suggested that [these] fields might exist," said Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Now, "we can see them clearly."

Images of these lines of magnetism were captured by an X-ray telescope aboard the Hinode spacecraft, which was launched in September on a mission to study the sun at close range. 

Scientists have measured the sun's surface temperature at about 10,000 degrees. Yet the corona, which reaches from the surface to the inner solar system, is about 1 million degrees.

According to the theories, the magnetic fields emanating from the sun's surface capture huge amounts of energy. When the fields relax, the stored energy is released, super-heating the corona. LA Times

The Swedish research, which looked at 64,500 people, linked raised blood sugar with pancreas, skin, womb, and urinary tract cancers in women. 

Diabetes experts said more evidence was needed to confirm the link. The study comes as other work links a high fat diet to increased breast cancer risk. BBC

The government would like to get the other 16 percent. Growing concern about this "tax gap" – underpayment due to a combination of cheating or failing to understand a complicated tax code – means that audits are on the rise and new rules could be on the way. The Christian Science Monitor 

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are. 

Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them. 

The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book “Sociobiology” that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” He may have jumped the gun about the time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made considerable progress. 

Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book “Moral Minds” that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, “Primates and Philosophers,” the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.

Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped. NYT (reg/req)

For example, during the heyday of the late 1970s, a bestseller from DC or Marvel Comics, two of the biggest publishers, could expect to sell 300,000 copies. These days a similar title would be fortunate to move more than 50,000.

For an industry famous for tales packed full of muscles and melodrama, the situation has prompted an unusual amount of soul searching. The would-be villains are many. Some have blamed the sales slide on cultural upstarts, like video games, manga and the ever-present Internet. Others point to the increased popularity of bookstore-friendly graphic novels, sales of which have recently surpassed traditional comics.

But there are those who have begun to ask more complex questions, like how characters that are 40, or even 70, years old can remain relevant in an increasingly diverse society. This raises one of the oldest and most uncomfortable truths about the superhero genre: its surprising dearth of non-white heroes, particularly black ones. Toronto Star 

The trope itself sounds so modern, so hip, so Gawkerish when attached to the likes of Stewart or Stephen Colbert, or dropped from the lips of the ex-Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” anchor Tina Fey, who declared as she departed SNL, “I’m out of the fake news business.” For the rest of us, we’re knee deep in the fake stuff and sinking fast. It comes at us from every quarter of the media—old and new—not just as satire but disguised as the real thing, secretly paid for by folks who want to remain in the shadows. And though much of it is clever, it’s not all funny. 

Fake news arrives on doorsteps around the world every day, paid for by You, Time magazine Person of the Year, a.k.a. Joe and Jane Citizen, in one way or another. Take for instance, the U.S. government’s 2005 initiative to plant “positive news” in Iraqi newspapers, part of a $300 million U.S. effort to sway public opinion about the war. And remember Armstrong Williams, the conservative columnist who was hired on the down low to act as a $240,000 sock puppet for the president’s No Child Left Behind program? Williams’s readers had no idea he was a paid propagandist until the Justice Department started looking into allegations of fraud in his billing practices. 

Fake news has had its lush innings. The Bush administration has worked hand-in-glove with big business to make sure of it. Together, they’ve credentialed fringe scientists and fake experts and sent them in to muddy scientific debates on global warming, stem cell research, evolution, and other matters. And as if that weren’t enough, the Department of Health and Human Services got caught producing a series of deceptive video news releases— VNRs in p.r.-industry parlance—touting the administration’s Medicare plan. The segments, paid political announcements really, ended with a fake journalist signing off like a real one—“In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting,” and they ran on local news shows all over the country without disclosure. All of this fakery taken together, it may be fair to say that the nation’s capital has been giving Comedy Central a run for its money as the real home of fake news. 
Columbia Journalism Review 

Bobby Kennedy's affair with the screen idol Marilyn Monroe has been documented, but a secret FBI file suggests the late U.S. attorney-general was aware of - and perhaps even a participant in - a plan "to induce" her suicide.

The detailed three-page report implicates the Hollywood actor Peter Lawford, Monroe's psychiatrist, staff and her publicist in the plot.

The allegations suggest the 36-year-old actress, who had a history of staging attention-seeking suicide attempts, was deliberately given the means to fake another suicide on August 4, 1962. But this time, it is suggested, she was allowed to die as she sought help. Sydney Morning Herald

"This is an extremely positive development," said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a US-based watchdog.

"It's the type of thing we have been advocating for a number of years." 

However, governments could still force Google to hold onto data or hand it over to authorities.

"By anonymising our server logs after 18 to 24 months, we think we're striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve Google's services for you, while providing more transparency and certainty about our retention practices," a statement from the search giant said. 

It added: "Unless we're legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymise our server logs after a limited period of time." BBC

The alleged No 3 in al-Qaida has long been suspected of being the mastermind behind the 2001 attacks in America but, if true, Mr Mohammed's most recent admissions would confirm his as a man the US has described as "one of history's most infamous terrorists".

Mr Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and spent time in secret CIA prisons before being moved with 13 others to a maximum security compound at Guantánamo Bay last year. Guardian

The cascade of controversies that followed Bush to Latin America has left a president familiar with weathering crises in uncharted territory. For the first time since taking office, Bush confronts political furors on multiple fronts and an opposition Congress armed with the subpoena power to investigate them. Washington Post (reg/req)

"That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan non-governmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday. AP

What happened next seems all too familiar to investors who bought technology stocks in 2000 at the breathless urging of Wall Street analysts. Last week, New Century said it would stop making loans and needed emergency financing to survive. The stock collapsed to $3.21. 

The analyst’s untimely call, coupled with a failure among other Wall Street institutions to identify problems in the home mortgage market, isn’t the only familiar ring to investors who watched the technology stock bubble burst precisely seven years ago.

Now, as then, Wall Street firms and entrepreneurs made fortunes issuing questionable securities, in this case pools of home loans taken out by risky borrowers. Now, as then, bullish stock and credit analysts for some of those same Wall Street firms, which profited in the underwriting and rating of those investments, lulled investors with upbeat pronouncements even as loan defaults ballooned. Now, as then, regulators stood by as the mania churned, fed by lax standards and anything-goes lending. NYT (reg/req)

Tiny aerosols and soot from burning wood and coal in winter, especially in China, appear to be seeding clouds in large winter storms that churn thousands of miles east across the northern Pacific, says a team of U.S. scientists. The pollution is turning relatively routine marine rain clouds into towering thunderheads, much like those seen above land.
Christian Science Monitor

A survey by the National Association of Home Builders has predicted that by 2015, 60% of custom-built homes will have two master bedroom suites. BBC

Mr Bush will also visit Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico in a week-long tour aimed at strengthening US ties with Latin America. BBC

This year, for the first time, there won't be enough storage capacity in the world to hold all the stuff being created, Gantz says. That doesn't mean the world is likely to run out of storage soon. "A lot of things don't need to be stored," he says.

Many personal e-mails are deleted as soon as they're read, and recorded digital TV programs deleted as soon as they're viewed.

But if supply ever runs low, companies will feel the pinch. Government regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are requiring firms to save more information than ever. Some companies retain copies of every e-mail.

For now, available storage is getting cheaper and more accessible. In 1990, a typical gigabyte of storage cost about $20,000, EMC's Lewis says. It's down to less than $1 today, he says. USA Today

"This is the mystery," says Max Bothwell, a research scientist with Environment Canada who studied the Vancouver blooms. "How could an endemic species invade?" 

Scientists, who often refer to Vancouver's experience as the "epicenter" of an ongoing global epidemic, are still not quite sure. Known as didymosphenia geminata, or "didymo" for short, the alga (algae is the plural form) has since bloomed in the Ozarks, the Rockies, Iceland, and Eastern Europe. And its worldwide spread seems to be accelerating. In 2002, didymo appeared in South Dakota, causing a near collapse of the Rapid Creek brown trout fishery. In 2004, it jumped hemispheres, covering New Zealand's famously scenic rivers with mats the likes of which scientists had seen nowhere else. And just last year, the alga appeared in Quebec's Matapedia River, an important East Coast salmon fishery. Christian Science Monitor

Rice plants including human genes involved in producing breast milk would be grown in the state of Kansas.

The company behind the proposal, Ventria Bioscience, says the plants could be developed into medicines for diarrhoea and dehydration in infants. 

Critics say parts of the rice plants could enter the food chain. BBC

The Discovery Channel's ``The Lost Tomb of Jesus,'' which airs March 4 at 9 p.m. New York time, contends that an excavated Jerusalem tomb may have contained the remains of Jesus of Nazareth, Mary Magdalene, a son named Judah and other family members. If true, the Greatest Story Ever Told will need a serious rewrite. Bloomberg News

The food may have been more expensive, but for many shoppers it was worth it. Since opening its first store in Austin, Tex., in 1980, Whole Foods has grown from a small business to a mega-chain with 193 stores, capping its rise last week with a deal to acquire the 110 stores of its largest rival, Wild Oats. 

The newer stores are getting bigger, too: 60,000- to 80,000-square-foot supermarkets, they have extensive prepared food offerings, along with in-store restaurants, spas, concierge shopping services, gelato stands, chocolate fountains and pizza counters. 

While many shoppers find the new stores exhilarating places to shop, the company also faces critics who feel it has strayed from its original vision. In angry postings on blogs, they charge that the store is not living up to its core values — in particular, protecting the environment and supporting organic agriculture and local farmers. In interviews, some of the customers who describe themselves as committed to these values say they have become disillusioned and taken their business elsewhere. NYT (reg/req)