Four teenagers, aged 15 and 16, who created a computer virus in early December which infected computers via the internet worldwide, have been arrested in Israel. The high school students have confessed to creating and spreading the Goner Windows virus. An Israeli law passed in Israel in 1995 mandates sentences of up to five years for the creation and distribution of virus programs.
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A new study finds that racism is a product of human evolution, although it is not programmed into the brain. This means that prejudice towards people of other races can be changed.
The research suggests that the tendency to notice someone?s skin color emerged for one reason: to detect shifting coalitions and alliances. Visual cues let people know which side a stranger was on and would have been important in hunter-gatherer societies.
Earlier studies suggested that human brains notice three main characteristics of a person on the first meeting: sex, age and race. But this new research shows that skin color is less important than scientists and psychologists originally thought.
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NASA is developing a system to train astronauts to do surgical operations on each other. On long space missions, astronauts could be many months away from the nearest surgeon. They are especially concerned about bone fractures, and on a manned Mars mission, the gravity of the planet would make them more likely to occur.
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A recent international conference on germ warfare ended in anger and chaos after the United States cut off discussions about enforcing the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
The 1972 treaty, ratified by the United States and 143 other nations, bans the development, stockpiling and production of germ warfare agents, but there is no enforcement mechanism. We now know that the former Soviet Union continued to do secret research on bioterrorist weapons long after the treaty was ratified. The purpose of the recent conference, which was held in Geneva, was to negotiate legally binding measures to enforce compliance.
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