Clipmarks |

Two clipworthy comments about the potential Clipmarks/Forbes deal

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:29:02 GMT

clipped by: egoldstein
clipper's remarks: These are two of the comments from Techcrunch's coverage. Two sentences here really jumped out at me.

1) it does something that neither digg nor delicious can do.
2) the community is much better than anywhere else. (my comment: damn right it is )

Clip Source: www.techcrunch.com

Prior to a social networking service, Clipmarks is a great online clipping tool. It allows users to create brief excerpts from long blog posts or articles and even rearrange paragraphs, images and other parts of text. So it does something that neither digg nor delicious can do. Its community and social networking features are all around this concept (clipping) and for this reason I think it can be a unique social networking service with no real competitors!

This is good for CLipmarks. I have used their service a lot and there are lots of good features. It is a Digg like service, yes, but Digg is hijacked by its fanatic users (only few). Clipmarks is not having any of these problems. The community is much better than anywhere else. I agree, forbes is more interested in their technology rather than site itself. But that would be good for the users.

Tags: clipmarks, forbes, business, web2.0

Eight-million-year-old bug is alive and growing

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 20:41:51 GMT

clipped by: Newfman

Clip Source: environment.newscientist.com

An 8-million-year-old bacterium that was extracted from the oldest known ice on Earth is now growing in a laboratory, claim researchers.

If confirmed, this means ancient bacteria and viruses will come back to life as ice melts due to global warming. This is nothing to worry about, say experts, because the process has been going on for billions of years and the bugs are unlikely to cause human disease.

Kay Bidle of Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, and his colleagues extracted DNA and bacteria from ice found between 3 and 5 metres beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. The ice gets older as it flows down the valleys and the researchers took five samples that were between 100,000 and 8 million years old.

The cultures grown from organisms found in the 100,000-year-old ice doubled in size every 7 days on average.

Tags: science

China threatens to crash the Dollar.

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 01:43:09 GMT

clipped by: BitDrifter

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation.

Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning - for the first time - that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress. Shifts in Chinese policy are often announced through key think tanks and academies.

Described as China's "nuclear option" in the state media, such action could trigger a dollar crash at a time when the US currency is already breaking down through historic support levels.

It would also cause a spike in US bond yields, hammering the US housing market and perhaps tipping the economy into recession. It is estimated that China holds over $900bn in a mix of US bonds.

Tags: business, economy, china, national secuirty, defense, dollar, money, currency, war, politics

The Earth fights back

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:40:43 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Never mind higher temperatures, climate change has a few nastier surprises in store. Bill McGuire says we can also expect more earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and tsunamis

Unlike most apparently intractable problems, which have a tendency to go away when examined closely and analytically, the climate change predicament just seems to get bigger and scarier the more we learn about it.

periods in our planet's history when the climate was swinging about wildly, most notably during the last ice age, it appears that far more than the weather was affected

an increase in volcanic activity, earthquakes, giant submarine landslides and tsunamis

there was a close correlation between how quickly sea levels went up and down during the last ice age and the level of explosive activity at volcanoes in Italy and Greece

how can rising sea levels cause volcanoes to erupt?

answer lies in the enormous mass of the water pouring into the ocean basins

seems to be sufficient to load and bend the underlying crust.

Tags: science, earth, global warming, earthquakes, volcanooes

Picture of Solar Ultraviolet Activity

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 17:15:26 GMT

clipped by: ColoradoRight

Clip Source: www.space.com

This image, captured by the orbiting SOHO solar observatory, shows extreme ultraviolet activity generated by the sun. SOHO was resuscitated by controllers on Earth after suffering a mysterious failure.

Tags: space

Picture of Four Galaxies Colliding

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:52:14 GMT

clipped by: ColoradoRight

Clip Source: www.space.com

One of the biggest galaxy collisions ever observed is taking place at the center of this image. The four white blobs in the middle are large galaxies that have begun to tangle and ultimately merge into a single gargantuan galaxy. The whitish cloud around the colliding galaxies contains billions of stars tossed out during the messy encounter. Other galaxies and stars appear in yellow, orange and red hues. Blue shows hot gas that permeates this distant region of tightly packed galaxies. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CXO/WIYN/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

Tags: space, telescope

Climate Change Endangers India

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 22:25:59 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Climate Change Endangers India, U.N. Says

NEW DELHI, Aug. 7 — As exceptionally heavy rains continued to cut a wide swath of ruin across northern India, a top United Nations official warned today that climate change could destroy vast swaths of farmland in this country, ultimately affecting food production and adding to the woes of already desperate peasants who live off of the land.

Even a small increase in temperatures, said Jacques Diouf, head of the Food and Agricultural Organization, could push down crop yields in the south around the world, even as agricultural productivity goes up in northern climes, including Europe. A greater frequency of droughts and floods, one of the hallmarks of climate change, the agency added, could be particularly bad for agriculture.

Tags: climate change, india, asia

Old Skull tells story of sex with Neandertal's

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 09:01:01 GMT

clipped by: Tallulah

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

Odd Skull Boosts Human, Neandertal Interbreeding Theory

A human skull from a Romanian bear cave is shaking up ideas about ancient sex.

The Homo sapiens skull has a distinctive feature previously found only in Neandertals, providing further evidence of interbreeding between the two species, according to a new study.

The human cranium was found during World War II mining operations in 1942, in a cave littered with Ice Age cave bear remains.

Recently the fossil was radiocarbon dated to 33,000 years ago and thoroughly examined, revealing the controversial anatomical feature.

The otherwise human skull has a groove at the base of the back of the skull, just above the neck muscle, that is ubiquitous in Neandertal specimens but has never been seen in the remains of a modern human, argues study leader Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Many researchers believe that modern humans killed off or simply outcompeted Neandertals until the latter went extinct.

Tags: skull, neandertal, human, interbreeding

The last socially acceptable prejudice

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 10:12:54 GMT

clipped by: liotropi
clipper's remarks: I have changed the title because obviously some people are not reading the clip & making wrong assumptions.

and the lists goes on and on...

Clip Source: rioiriri.blogspot.com

I was thinking about the things that a fat person cannot do without others looking down on them or making mean comments. Here is my list; feel free to add to it!

- eat any food, even "healthy" food

- engage in athletic activity ("ewww look at all that fat jiggling")

- exercise in a gym or other public place ("who do you think you're kidding?")

- wear revealing clothing ("ewww gross")

- wear overly casual clothing (we get called slobs, while skinny people get a pass on wearing sweatpants in public)

- be sick ("maybe if you'd lose weight, you would be healthy")

- go to a doctor or emergency room ("It looks like you have a broken nose. You should lose weight.")

- date someone who is not fat ("what is wrong with him, doesn't he notice?" "he can do better than that"), especially someone who is regarded as good-looking (even a good-looking fat man is regarded as dating beneath his station if he dates a fat girl)

- have or adopt children, OR decide to not have children

Tags: fatism