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Having SARS may make you want to cry, but if you do, youcould infect others, since the SARS virus has been found inthe tears of infected people. Hopefully, a vaccine will beready before SARS arrives in the U.S.

Doctors have found that tears can be used as a way toidentify SARS patients early, before they can infect manyother people. Researchers say, “Even as the epidemic hasdied down, we are warned of future outbreaks. This may be asimple tool in identifying probably cases in future andprospective trials are being designed for this purpose.”
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Besides ending life on planets through impacts, asteroidsmay also spread life throughout the universe. Although thislife is in the form of tiny bacteria which are only thebeginning of a long evolution to intelligent life, it doesmean that most life will be carbon-based, so if we ever domeet aliens we may recognize them. The planet(s) where lifeoriginated may have died long ago, but thanks to spacerocks, life still exists.

Maggie McKee writes in New Scientist that the nearby starsystem Tau Ceti, which astronomers think could have life onit, has 10 times more asteroids and comets than are in ourSolar System. They could have seeded life on these planetsbut they probably killed it off as well.
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Terrorists may act like madmen, but psychologists say theyare actually sane, ordinary people. Most al-Qaeda terroristsare middle class family men. Two-thirds have collegeeducations (a tenth even have a postgraduate degrees) andseven out of 10 are married with children.
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Fossil records show that societies do better if there areold folks around, and scientists think they know why.

Will Knight writes in New Scientist that seniors played animportant role in the spread of human civilization 30,000years ago, according to a new study of the human fossilrecord. Researchers Rachel Caspari and Sang-Hee Lee studieddental fossils belonging to early humans and pre-humanspecies dating back 3 million years, in order to judge theirages. In those days, you were “old” at age 30. There wereseveral kinds of pre-humans but only one of them lastedlonger enough to become the ancestors of modern man. Thedifference may have been the number of seniors.
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