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Full Story At Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ever wondered how Santa Claus can travel around the world in just one night on his reindeer-pulled sleigh and deliver toys to all the children?

“He exploits the space-time continuum,” says Larry Silverberg, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University.

Santa’s magic may go far beyond merely traveling across 200 million square miles (322 million sq km) to visit hundreds of millions of homes of believing children in just one night, Silverberg said.

“He understands that space stretches, he understands that you can stretch time, compress space and therefore he can, in a sense, actually have six Santa months to deliver the presents,” Silverberg told Reuters.

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Full Story At  Newsweek.com

Dallas Hextell was just a baby when his parents bought him a walker—not because he was late reaching a milestone, but because they worried he might never toddle on his own. At 9 months he had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a form of brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation in utero or at birth. A neurologist had told Derak and Cynthia Hextell there was no cure, that it was best to wait and see if their son improved. But Cynthia, after months of research, enrolled Dallas in a highly experimental trial at Duke University, where a pediatric-transplant surgeon infused him with a sample of his own stem cells harvested from his umbilical-cord blood. A few days later, Derak and Cynthia went home with their son, who was 18 months old and still not crawling, much less walking or talking. They “stared at him” for a week, says Cynthia. “One day he just started saying, ‘Mama, mama, mama.’ And I started crying.” The Hextells ended up donating the walker to another child. By 2, Dallas was not only walking unaided, he was chasing the family dogs.

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Full Story At VIDEO: Iceland Puffin Threatened

December 5, 2008—In Iceland’s remote Westman Islands, warming weather is threatening a beloved mascot: the Atlantic puffin.

Video by Public Television’s Wild Chronicles, from National Geographic Mission Programs

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Full Story At CNET News

The Department of Homeland Security has failed to ensure the nation’s cybersecurity, a new report to be released Monday concludes, because the threat of cyberattacks is too vast for any one agency to tackle and must be addressed by a new White House office, as well as revised laws and government practices.

As President-elect Barack Obama fills the remaining cabinet positions in his administration, a Center for Strategic and International Studies commission is recommending Obama create a new office in the White House: the National Office for Cyberspace, headed by an Assistant to the President for Cyberspace. The Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency, an independent, nonpartisan group, releases its final report Monday after more than a year of exploring how to address the country’s cybersecurity threats.

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Full Story At  CBS News

(CBS/AP) One of the scientists sharing the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering HIV said Saturday he believes there will be a therapeutic vaccine to treat the virus within five years.

Luc Montagnier, of France, told reporters in Sweden that he believed it was “a matter of 4 to 5 years” before a therapeutic vaccine to treat HIV infection is developed. He did not elaborate as to why he believed scientists were close.

Scientists have developed lifesaving drugs that can inhibit the disease, but there is no vaccine to prevent or treat HIV infection. Finding a vaccine has proved elusive in the past, with the most recent trials ending in failure.

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Full Story At  Reuters

GENEVA (Reuters) - Repairing the giant particle collider built to simulate the “Big Bang” could cost up to 35 million Swiss francs ($29 million), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Friday.

Announcing a further delay to the Large Hadron Collider’s resumption, now expected in summer, CERN spokesman James Gillies said repairs will cost 15 million Swiss francs, and spare parts would cost another 10-20 million Swiss francs.

The massive collider, the largest and most complex machine ever made, has already cost 10 billion Swiss francs to build, supported by CERN’s 20 European member states and other nations including the United States and Russia.

“We will not be going to our member states asking for more money, we will deal with it within the current CERN budget,” Gillies said.

The collider was designed to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang, believed by most cosmologists to have created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

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Full Story At  Wired.com

SAN FRANCISCO -– The Bush administration on Tuesday urged a federal judge to dismiss lawsuits against the nation’s telecommunications companies accused of complying with the government’s once-secret spy program adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks on the United States.

“That was designed to protect from a terrorist attack,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Carl Nichols told U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker.

Walker was hearing oral arguments on whether to uphold legislation barring lawsuits against the telecoms for violating Americans’ privacy if they forwarded electronic communications to the government. “I don’t think it would be appropriate for this court to look back and second-guess the administration,” Nichols added.

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Full Story At  CBS News

AP) A Massachusetts girl’s awful experience on a school bus is at the heart of a case argued in the Supreme Court Tuesday over limits on lawsuits about sex discrimination in education.

The 5-year-old kindergarten student in Hyannis, Mass., told her parents that in 2000 a third-grade boy repeatedly made her lift her dress, pull down her underwear and spread her legs.

Local police and the school system investigated, but found insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges or definitively sort out the story, according to court records. The district refused to assign the boy to another bus or put a monitor on the bus, records show.

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