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How can astronauts practice for future missions without actually traveling in space? Veteran astronauts Scott Kelly and Rex Walheim and their team will spend 5 days 63 feet underwater off the Florida Coast near Key Largo. Wearing diving gear, they swam down to the Aquarius undersea laboratory to begin the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) exercise, which will mimic a stay on board the International Space Station. The Aquarius laboratory is three miles off the Florida coast at Key Largo.
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Scientists are trying to find ways to attack hurricanes. Nine jets are planning to fly over southern Florida, each carrying 16,000-330,000 pounds of cloud-busting powder. When sprayed into a wet cloud, this powder combines with the moisture and turns into a heavy gel, which will then fall to the ground, removing the moisture from the cloud. They hope this powder will make hurricane Isidore much weaker. “We just want to take a punch out of a storm so it doesn’t level your house,” says Peter Cordani, of Dyn-o-Mat, the creator of the powder.
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According to new comparisons of human and chimpanzee DNA, we are not as close to our primate cousins as we thought. Scientists have told us that we share 98.5% of our genetic material with chimps, but now it appears that we share less than 95%.

Roy Britten of Caltech was suspicious about the 98.5% figure, even though he invented the technique that produced it. By measuring the temperature at which matching DNA of two species comes apart, you can figure out how different they are. But there are errors inherent in this method, and these produced the higher percentage. By correcting for these errors, Britten came up with the new, lower correlation of 95%.
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California has adopted a new law permitting scientific research on embryonic stem cells, despite rejection of the use of federal funds for the same type of research by President Bush. The Senate is still considering legislation that would ban this type of research completely. Along with recent legislation regarding the use of medical marijuana, the new law brings up the question of what will happen when state and federal laws clash. The last time this happened in a major way, we fought the Civil War.
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