It's well known that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, a swirl of stars in an extended, many-armed disk . But the structure of the galaxy is far from two-dimensional. Above and below those familiar spiral arms is a lesser-known feature, a spherical swarm of stars that makes up a halo around the disk.

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Scientific American – News

A drug that targets blood vessels in the brain shows promise in animal tests.

It’s estimated that five million people in the U.S. suffer from the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI)—which can range from coma to loss of movement to cognitive and behavioral problems. A large percentage of soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan have sustained some form of TBI. Scientists have been searching for years for drugs that could ameliorate the effects of these injuries, but so far, none have been shown to prevent damage or speed healing.

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The founder of shut down file-sharing website Megaupload, Kim Dotcom, is granted bail by a New Zealand court.
BBC News – Technology

About 300 million years ago, volcanic ash buried a tropical forest located in what is now Inner Mongolia, much like it did the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

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Scientific American – News

Unlike many Web pages, the traffic to some sites doesn’t fall over time. A new model of Web traffic shows why.

Back in 2005, a group of computer scientists carried out a now-famous study of the way visits to a website fall over time. These guys looked at the traffic to a Hungarian news site and found that it decayed as a power law.

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Report suggests use of social messaging apps like Whatsapp instead of traditional SMS lost networks $ 13.9bn (£8.8bn) last year.
BBC News – Technology

Earth started as a violent place, its surface churned by continuous volcanic eruptions and cloaked in an atmosphere that would have been poisonous to today's life-forms . Furthermore, the thin primeval atmosphere may have provided only scant protection from the young sun's harsh ultraviolet glare. Given these inhospitable conditions, scientists have long wondered: How did the first cells come to be nearly four billion years ago?

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Scientific American – News

The latest handheld console from Sony – the Playstation Vita – will be launched in Europe on Tuesday.
BBC News – Technology

Computer scientists have developed a simple algorithm that accurately guesses your hometown using the location information of photos uploaded to Flickr

There’s growing evidence that if you are part of a social network, the structure of the network itself can reveal important information about you, regardless of what you have published yourself. 

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The storage in your phone has a bigger effect on your apps than you might think.

The latest smart phones and tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month came with an emphasis on faster processors and compatibility with faster wireless networks. But new research shows that the biggest performance bottleneck with popular smart-phone apps such as Facebook and Google Maps is, in fact, the speed with they can read and write a device’s data storage. The results suggest that without changing how mobile gadgets store data, the benefits of new networks and processors will be limited.

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