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Seven species of vulnerable sharks and manta rays have now been submitted by 35 countries for consideration for protection next year under an international treaty concerned with regulating wildlife trade.

Governments met the deadline today and formally submitted their proposals for the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in March 2013. The recommendations include porbeagle and oceanic whitetip sharks, three species of hammerhead sharks, and two types of manta rays. For nearly 40 years, CITES has shielded thousands of plants and animals from overexploitation through international trade, and the treaty is widely considered one of the best-enforced international conservation agreements.

Online fundraisers taking part in organized events use social media to reach close to 600 people and inspire others to take on challenges for charity, according to new data from JustGiving.com
 Speaking at Making every step count: How to maximize participation and fundraising at your event, Howard Bell, Director of Partnerships at JustGiving revealed new data showing that each individual fundraising campaign is seen by an average of 562 people on Facebook.
 What's more, the event fundraising 'network effect' means fundraisers encourage others to follow their lead. One in four fundraisers will choose either to take part in the same event for charity the next year or will inspire a friend or family member to take part instead. 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted Boston Scientific Corporation regulatory approval for its S-ICD(R) System, the world's first and only commercially available subcutaneous implantable defibrillator (S-ICD) for the treatment of patients at risk for sudden cardiac arrest (SCA).
Sudden cardiac arrest is an abrupt loss of heart function. Most episodes are caused by the rapid and/or chaotic activity of the heart known as ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation. Recent estimates show that approximately 850,000 people in the United States are at risk of SCA and indicated for an ICD device, but remain unprotected

 Apollo Hospitals performed a complex spinal surgery on a 10-year-old child, the 12th successful surgery done within 10 days of the launch of Renaissance Robotic Technology, the only technology specifically designed for spine surgery. Apollo Hospitals Group is the first in the Asia-Pacific to offer this surgical guidance system, which is a minimally-invasive robotic-guided spine surgery. 
A 10-year-old girl from Gujarat, Heema was born with congenital anomalies that left her with a severely deformed spine. Before being admitted to Apollo Hospitals, the child had already undergone multiple procedures that had failed and left her with rods placed in her back, broken at multiple places, and a spine that was grotesquely deformed.

For over a year, Google has been the target of U.S. and European antitrust investigations, but now the search company has fired back. In a report commissioned by Google and released today, two acclaimed antitrust experts dismiss Google's critics' claims as lacking any compelling legal or economic argument for a government antitrust case.

What Does the Chicago School Teach About Internet Search and the Antitrust Treatment of Google? the work of Judge Robert Bork and Professor Gregory Sidak. The report examines the legal theories of Google's critics and compares those conjectures to the real-world search experience.

Hydraulic fracturing technology, called fracking, has been around since the 1940s but has recently gained attention as the energy industry expanded cleaner natural gas production.
The inaugural Energy Census from business intelligence company Polecat says it is a big topic, with energy writers noting that CO2 emissions from energy have plummeted and coal emissions have gone even farther back in time, to the days of the first Reagan administration. Meanwhile, detractors claim it causes headaches and cancer (cancer has been the go-to disease for everything since Rachel Carson made up a scare about DDT 50 years ago) and even that it could cause the earth to deflate.

If you ask an adult for the midpoint between 1 and 9 they say 5. Mentally, they put 9 points on a ine and add 1 and then split that in half.But if you ask a child or someone from a culture not trained in maths, the answer could be different; perhaps 3. It isn't that they don't know how to count, it's because it's actually more natural for humans to think logarithmically instead of linearly, say researchers.  Neural circuits seem to bear out that hypothesis; in psychological experiments, multiplying the intensity of some sensory stimuli causes a linear increase in perceived intensity.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is officially 50 years old today and this morning, for the first time ever, observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope were made of an object chosen by the public. The winner of an anniversary competition pointed the VLT towards the spectacular Thor’s Helmet Nebula and the observations were broadcast live over the Internet. The signing of the ESO Convention on October 5th, 1962 and the foundation of ESO was the culmination of the dream of astronomers from five European countries; Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. They had decided to join forces with the primary goal of building a large telescope that would give them access to the southern sky.

Duck-billed dinosaurs, also known as hadrosaurids, had an amazing capacity to chew tough and abrasive plants with grinding teeth more complex than those of cows, horses, and other modern grazers. 

Black holes may not be so dangerous to stars after all. The discovery of a star named S0-102 may help reveal whether Albert Einstein was right in his fundamental prediction of how black holes warp space and time - it orbits the enormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy in a blazing 11.5 years. Black holes, which form out of the collapse of matter, have such high density that nothing can escape their gravitational pull, not even light. They cannot be seen directly, but their influence on nearby stars is visible and provides a signature. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that mass distorts space and time and therefore not only slows down the flow of time but also stretches or shrinks distances. 

Serial killers and recidivist criminals of all kinds lack empathy.  So do some people with poor social skills. A compassion-based meditation program called Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) was recently used to try and improve the ability to read the facial expressions of others. 

A skull fragment unearthed in Tanzania verifies that our ancient ancestors were eating meat at least 1,500,000 years ago and that can tell us something about the evolution of human physiology and brain development and why we wouldn't be where we are if there was a Prehistoric PETA.The two-inch skull fragment was found at the famed Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, a site that for decades has yielded numerous clues into the evolution of modern humans and is sometimes called `the cradle of mankind.'