The U.S. and South Korea Monday are staging two major joint wargames next month, playing out a nuclear threat from North Korea. Wargames like these are often played before major military maneuvers are launched. The U.S. says the games are “defense-oriented” and designed to improve the U.S.-South Korean combined ability to defend South Korea against “external aggression.” Meanwhile, North Korea says that its army of 1.1 million will win any nuclear war with the U.S. and denounces the games as “preparations to provoke a nuclear war” targeting them.

Did Hitler invent flying saucers while trying to create a major new weapon?

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A new study says that the re-use of dirty needles in healthcare is the main cause of the AIDS epidemic that is depopulating Africa. For years, researchers puzzled over the fact that they could find no common sexual practices that explained the rise in AIDS among heterosexuals there. “We’ve gathered all the literature we can on AIDS in Africa and the best we can estimate, for sexual transmission, is a quarter to a third,” says anthropologist David Gisselquist. This means that AIDS prevention should concentrate on providing single-use needles rather than on sexual education or condoms.
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The Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the 1500s, is famous for her mysterious smile. We’re fascinated by the smile because it disappears when it’s looked at directly, says Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University. It’s only apparent when we look at other parts of the painting, because of the way the human eye processes visual information.

The eye has two types of vision, foveal and peripheral. Foveal, or direct vision, is picks up detail but is less able to pick up shadows. “The elusive quality of the Mona Lisa’s smile can be explained by the fact that her smile is almost entirely in low spatial frequencies, and so is seen best by your peripheral vision,” Livingstone says. The more a person stares straight ahead, the less useful their peripheral vision is. read more

Despite the fact that we’re able to send probes far out into the universe, we still don’t know how our own Moon was created. Astrophysicist Dr. Robin Canup has a new theory?he says the Moon was created in a double impact 4.5 billion years ago, which destroyed almost all of the Earth as it existed then. A young planet that was almost our twin hit the Earth not just once, but twice. The Earth re-formed, but the debris from the impacting planet became our Moon.
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