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You don’t want to know: A new study found evidence suggesting that a class of antibiotics previously banned by the US government for poultry production is still in use. And there are other strange things besides antibiotics in our chicken as well: Poultry on factory farms are routinely fed caffeine, active ingredients in the over-the-counter medicines Tylenol and Benadryl, and even arsenic.

In the April 5th edition of the New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof quotes researcher Keeve E. Nachman as saying, "We were kind of floored. It’s unbelievable what we found."
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Scientists are working hard to achieve invisibility. A group of researchers have created a cylinder which makes its contents invisible to magnetic fields.

If there’s a military use for this, nobody’s thought of it yet, but there are definitely medical applications. For instance, in the future, similar devices could serve to protect a pacemaker in a patient (so he or she wouldn’t need to stay away from restaurants with microwaves).
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Chimps can read each others’ minds to an extent. If, for instance, one of them spots a dangerous snake hiding in the leaves on the forest floor, he seems to know whether or not he needs to alert the others–whether or not they have noticed it too. Videos of wild chimps in Uganda reveal that, when they spot the fake snake that scientists have hidden there, they are more likely to make warning calls when if others in their troop have not seen the danger.
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Disposing of plastic trash will be one of the biggest problems we face in 2012. The oceans are filled with plastic items that have washed out to sea (or been dumped from ships), and several coastal communities in California have banned plastic bags.

It’s a problem in Europe as well: Five hundred tons of Christmas tree lights, not to mention food wrappers, plastic bottles and broken toys, will be thrown away in the UK this year, and only a tiny proportion will be recycled.
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