While conventional wisdom tells us that things are bad and getting worse, scientists and the science-minded among us see good news in the coming years. That’s the bottom line of an outburst of high-powered optimism gathered from the world-class scientists and thinkers who frequent the pages of Edge, in an ongoing conversation among third culture […]

Muslim scholars from around the world have called for female genital mutilation to be banned and those who carry it out to face punishment.
At a conference on the subject in the Egyptian capital Cairo, the scholars said governments should enforce existing laws against the practice.
Full Story: BBC.
(thanks Honky Tonk Dragon)
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Rather than upgrading our car or television, we’ll spend the cash in coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, sports clubs and theme parks. We’ll splash out on European city breaks or walking the Inca trail. Experiences, in other words.
“The amount that people spend on retail goods as a proportion of consumer spending has gone down in the […]

Scientists working in Ethiopia have discovered skeleton of a three- year-old girl who lived 3.3 million years ago, that is 150,000 years before Lucy in Dikika area, North Eastern Ethiopia, Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Plank Institute in Leipzig, Germany, said.
While officially declaring the discovery here yesterday, Dikika Research Project Paleoanthropolgical Research Team Leader, […]

Things Are Good is another new good news blog.
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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 single molecule, trapped between two electrodes, acts as a switch and has a ‘memory’ of the type used in data storage, Swiss and US researchers have found.
Heike Riel of IBM’s research labs in Zurich says this is ‘a step along the way’ to making nanoscale electronic components a reality.
Full Story:Chemistry World.
(via Kurzweil […]

Leading European supermarkets, food manufacturers and fast-food chains, including McDonald’s, are expected to pledge today not to use soya illegally grown in the Amazon region in response to evidence that large areas of virgin forest are being felled for the crop.
In a victory for consumer power, the companies say they will not deal with the […]

Rapes and attempted rapes have declined in the United States, and sharply, in the past 30 years, according to the government’s most painstaking crime survey. A second big government tally finds the same trend but a gentler decline.
The decline, in the view of one top criminologist, James Alan Fox of Northeastern University in Boston, […]

ContextPlus, an adware company implicated in a large number of stealth rootkit infections, has stopped distributing its software, citing concerns over the practices of some distribution partners.
In a brief note posted on its home page, ContextPlus said it is “no longer able to ensure the highest standards of quality and customer care” and will stop […]