The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.
Paper […]

A small, affordable wind turbine available for the first time this September promises to help homeowners fight the rising cost of energy.
The Skystream 3.7, a wind generator from Southwest Windpower in Flagstaff, Ariz., stands 35 to 100 feet tall — depending on the location — and costs about half that of conventional turbines currently available.
Southwest […]

A federal judge in Seattle yesterday overturned new Bush administration rules that weaken the governing of pesticide use and their effect on endangered plants and animals. The court struck down the EPA’s new rules and restored prior standards that provided greater protection to protected wildlife. The judge determined that the rules were “arbitrary and capricious” […]

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a Bush administration plan to allow commercial logging in Giant Sequoia National Monument, home to two-thirds of the world’s largest trees.
U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer sided with state Attorney General Bill Lockyer and environmental groups that sued the U.S. Forest Service over plans to permit timber cuts on […]

Jellyfish and other Cnidaria have stinging cells called cnidocysts. These shoot a tiny hollow thread, at incredibly high speed, into anything that touches a “trigger” near the cell’s opening, and then pump toxin through the thread into the target.
The inventors propose extracting the toxin without killing or triggering the cells, […]

China said initial test results of its first AIDS vaccine showed it could protect people against the HIV virus.
None of the participants in the clinical trial’s first phase showed severe adverse reactions after 180 days and some showed immunity to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after receiving the vaccine, the State Food and Drug Administration […]

In what could prove to be a medical milestone, researchers have succeeded in generating new lines of human embryonic stem cells without destroying the embryo.
The breakthrough may enable scientists to circumvent the ban on federal funding of stem cell research, paving the way for gains in treating or curing diseases such as diabetes, spinal injury […]

Just 35 percent of 1,033 adults polled say they favor the war in Iraq; 61 percent say they oppose it — the highest opposition noted in any CNN poll since the conflict began more than three years ago.
Full Story: Daily Kos.
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A judge ordered the Bush administration on Thursday to stop a domestic wiretap program it says protects Americans from terrorism but which the judge said violated their civil rights.
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U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor said the wiretaps under a five-year-old “Terrorist Surveillance Program” violated freedom of speech, protections against unreasonable searches and a constitutional check […]

More than 500 children in Thailand are expected to receive the machines in October and November for quality testing and debugging.
The One Laptop Per Child program, which began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and now is a separate nonprofit organization, hopes to deploy 5 million to 7 million machines in Thailand, Nigeria, […]