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A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow

Researchers found that oral capsules containing human feces may be an effective and safer alternative to fecal transplants for patients with Clostridium difficile infections.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Giant leap against diabetes

Harvard stem cell researchers announced a giant leap forward in the quest to find a truly effective treatment for type 1 diabetes, a disease that affects an estimated 3 million Americans.

Click to view the original at news.harvard.edu

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Home — Leandro Pereira

06 October 2014 Life of a HTTP request, as seen by my toy web server When learning a new programming language, I tend to write two things with it: a language interpreter (usually a FORTH-like language or Brainfuck if I’m feeling lazy), and a HTTP server. Sometimes, just as a challenge or a way to qu…

Click to view the original at tia.mat.br

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Aboard Amtrak

For some months, Amtrak was my home. It began simply somewhat unintentionally. A friend was getting married in Spokane, Washington, I was in New York, and the 45 day Amtrak pass was cheaper than rent. And so, I was on a train stopped in Washington DC. The station there is really magnificent, marbled…

Click to view the original at spnzr.com

Hasnain says:

Hands down one of the best pieces I've read in a really long time. It has a little bit of everything and is quite interesting.

(Apparently I had a facebook tab open with this text a week ago, but forgot to post)

Posted on 2014-10-12T19:06:42+0000

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Reverse Engineering Star Wars: Yoda Stories

Zach Barth zach@zachtronics.com October 5th, 2014 Background I don't know why, but I've always gotten a kick out of reverse engineering data files for computer games. Although decompiling a game's code is a challenging task, data files are often much easier to figure out (as they contain lots of hig…

Click to view the original at zachtronics.com

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The Man Who Smuggles Traders Joe’s into Canada

Imagine -- maybe you don’t have to -- you’re Canadian. You’re at a dinner party, and the host has put out a bowl of the best snack you’ve ever had. Love at first bite, and it’s going fast. Soon enough, your fingers graze the bottom of the bowl and you realize that the end is nigh. You master your pa…

Click to view the original at priceonomics.com

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How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math - Issue 17: Big Bangs - Nautilus

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague.…

Click to view the original at nautil.us

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The NSA and Me - The Intercept

James Bamford literally wrote the book on the National Security Agency, spending 30 years obsessively documenting the secretive agency in print. Today, for the first time, he tells the story of his brief turn as an NSA whistleblower.

Click to view the original at firstlook.org

Hasnain says:

"Despite the threats, I refused to alter my manuscript or return the documents. Instead, we argued that according to Executive Order 12065, “classification may not be restored to documents already declassified and released to the public” under the Freedom of Information Act. That prompted the drama to move all the way up to the White House. On April 2, 1982, President Reagan signed a new executive order on secrecy that overturned the earlier one and granted him the authority to “reclassify information previously declassified and disclosed.”"

Posted on 2014-10-02T22:49:50+0000

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Best Papers vs. Top Cited Papers

Search and perform data mining operations against academic publications, using social network analysis to identify connections between researchers, conferences, and publications.

Click to view the original at arnetminer.org

Hasnain says:

I find it interesting how a lot of the best paper award winning papers end up becoming false positives, and the really great papers are not recognized immediately.

Posted on 2014-10-01T23:21:24+0000