8 Tips to Make Your Home Green – and Save You Money – “Want to make your home more environmentally friendly? Are you eager to roll up your sleeves on a new home improvement project or just simply improve your current energy efficiency? Why not combine the two? Here are several green DIY projects and home improvement tips that will help your home be more energy-efficient, reduce your carbon footprint and even save you some money in the process…”

In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents’ Genes Are in Competition – “Two scientists, drawing on their own powers of observation and a creative reading of recent genetic findings, have published a sweeping theory of brain development that would change the way mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia are understood…”

15 amazing Web apps built in 48 hours – “Earlier this month, the Rails Rumble 2008 announced the eight winners of its programming competition where teams of up to four people had 48 hours to build original (and somewhat complete) Web apps. Ruby on Rails is perhaps best known as the app development platform that built Twitter. But competitions like the Rumble prove how powerful the young platform can be. Here, we showcase the competition winners along with other cool apps of enterprise appeal from the 130 qualifying entries. Winners were selected by an open vote on the Internet and were judged on appearance, completeness, innovation and usefulness…”

7 Executive Orders President Obama Should Sign to Protect the Environment: Center for Progressive Reform – “At the time of this writing, Barack Obama has been president-elect for less than a week and no one is wasting any time in making suggestions for actions he should take once he’s President Obama. The Center for Progressive Reform passed on their suggestions for 7 Executive Orders for the President’s First 100 Days and so I pass them on to you to debate, discuss and otherwise armchair analyze…”

Linux Mint: A better Ubuntu – “Linux Mint, while relatively new, has gained a lot of fans from the linux community, and is now the third most popular on DistroWatch, slowly crunching on openSUSE lead. It brings something a lot of distro have tried: simplicity, functionality, and of course looks. Let’s see what makes Linux Mint fresh and if it’s worth switching from Ubuntu…”

Astronauts head for extreme home makeover in space – The international space station is about to get all the comforts of a modern, high-end, “green” home: a fancy recycling water filter, a new fridge, extra bedrooms, workout equipment and the essential half-bath…”

‘Super-microscope’ opens at Isis – “The £200m second target station at Isis in Oxfordshire will allow scientists to see things 10,000 times thinner than a human hair…”

7 Fail-proof Ways to Rev Up Your Fat Burning and Get Lean – “If you’re like me, you can eat healthy much of the time, exercise a lot, and still find your fat-burning efforts at a plateau…”

American fast food is almost entirely made of corn – “American fast food is almost entirely produced from corn according to a chemical analysis of dishes served at McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…”

Linux boots in 2.97 seconds – “Japanese embedded Linux house Lineo has announced a quick-start technology that it claims can boot Linux in 2.97 seconds on a low-powered system. The technology appears similar to but much faster than Linux’s existing “suspend-to-disk” capability…”

Overclocked Radeon HD 4870 X2 Shoot-Out: ASUS, MSI – “NVIDIA’s and AMD’s graphics board partners usually take differing approaches when releasing factory overclocked variants of each company’s respective high-end GPUs. When NVIDIA launches a new part for example, their board partners typically have factory overclocked versions at the ready, and at launch, it’s sometimes easier to find overclocked cards than stock reference models. AMD’s board partners, however, don’t usually take the same approach. When AMD launches a new ATI Radeon, the first batch of cards to hit typically follow the reference design to the letter, and custom, factory overclocked models don’t arrive until some time later…”

Mystery of lost US nuclear bomb – “The United States abandoned a nuclear weapon beneath the ice in northern Greenland following a crash in 1968, a BBC investigation has found…”

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