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Rare Find Backs Shape-Shifting Neutrino - Scientists

Physicists announced further proof Wednesday for a theory that mysterious particles called neutrinos which go "missing" on the journey from the Sun to Earth are in fact shape-shifting along the way, arriving undetected.

The evidence: a muon-type neutrino dispatched from the CERN research laboratory near Geneva had arrived as a tau neutrino at the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, 730 kilometers (450 miles) away, they said in a statement.

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U.S. Regulators Under Fire over Bee-Toxic Pesticides

U.S. environmental regulators are under fire from beekeepers and conservationists who say they are failing to vet risky pesticides that put people and valuable crop pollinators like bees in peril.

On Wednesday, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a scathing report of the Environmental Protection Agency's record of using a loophole to allow more than 10,000 "untested or under-tested" pesticides on the market.

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Study: 'Holy Grail' Foot-and-Mouth Vaccine Created

British scientists have developed a "holy grail" vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease that is safer and more resilient than current vaccines, according to an article published in journal PLOS pathogens Wednesday.

At the moment, animals are given a small dose of live infectious virus to stimulate the body's immune system into producing antibodies that recognize and destroy the pathogen whenever it appears in the bloodstream.

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Is Global Warming Causing Harsher Winters?

Millions of people in northern Europe are still battling snow and ice, wondering why they are being punished with bitter cold when -- officially -- spring has arrived and Earth is in the grip of global warming.

Yet some scientists, eyeing the fourth year in a row of exceptionally harsh late-winter weather in parts of Europe and North America, suggest warming is precisely the problem.

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Philippines Turns Trash into Clean Energy Windfall

Teresita Mabignay does her ironing using free electricity on the slope of a garbage dump, an unlikely beneficiary of efforts to turn the Philippines' growing rubbish problems into a clean-energy windfall.

Mabignay lives at the base of one of Manila's largest landfills, which was the first in the country to have its methane gas converted into power as part of a United Nations' program aimed at tackling climate change.

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Short of Water, Peru's Engineers 'Make our Own'

The message emblazoned on a billboard outside the Peruvian capital sounds almost too good to be true: drinkable water for anyone who wants some in this arid village.

Even more intriguingly, the fresh, pure water on offer along a busy road in this dusty town some 90 kilometers (55 miles) south of Lima, has been extracted, as if by magic, from the humid air.

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Landlubber Chameleons Became Sailors

Chameleons took to the waves to migrate from Africa to Madagascar about 65 million years ago, said a study published on Wednesday that seeks to resolve a roiling biological debate.

Chameleons are famous for the extraordinary ability of some species to change colour, and for a lightning-fast talent to catch prey with their tongue.

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World's Biggest Creature Tracked by its Song

An Australian-led group of scientists has for the first time tracked down and tagged Antarctic blue whales by using acoustic technology to follow its songs, the government said Wednesday.

The blue whale, the largest animal on the planet, is rarely spotted in the Southern Ocean but a group of intrepid researchers were able to locate and tag some of the mammals after picking up on their deep and complex vocals.

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Early Number Sense Plays Role in Later Math Skills

We know a lot about how babies learn to talk, and youngsters learn to read. Now scientists are unraveling the earliest building blocks of math — and what children know about numbers as they begin first grade seems to play a big role in how well they do everyday calculations later on.

The findings have specialists considering steps that parents might take to spur math abilities, just like they do to try to raise a good reader.

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New Study Highlights California Tsunami Risk

More than a quarter of a million Californians live in coastal areas which could be hit by devastating floods from a major tsunami in the quake-prone U.S. state, a new study says.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study, published to mark Tsunami Awareness Week, says tidal waves of eight meters or more could hit northern California following a quake of magnitude 8 or more from a well-known tectonic fault line.

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