[Politico]
The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on "fear" of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."

[ABC News]
Even as many Americans still struggle to recover from the country's worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, another crisis—one that will be even worse than the current one—is looming, according to a new report from a group of leading economists, financiers, and former federal regulators.

[MSNBC]
The Senate has passed—by voice vote without debate—a one-year extension of key parts of the USA Patriot Act. The proposed privacy protections were cast aside when Senate Democrats lacked the necessary 60-vote supermajority to pass them.

[The Washington Independent]
Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. On at least one occasion, an individual claiming to work for the company evidently signed for a weapons shipment using the name of a “South Park” cartoon character. And Blackwater has yet to return hundreds of the guns to the military.

[CNN]
Americans overwhelmingly think that the government in the U.S. is broken, according to a new national poll.

[The New York Times]
After five years of often bitter internal debate, the Justice Department has concluded in a report that the lawyers who gave legal justification to the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation tactics for terrorism suspects used flawed legal reasoning but were not guilty of professional misconduct.

[AlterNet]
If the U.S. had a functioning criminal justice system for the powerful, former Vice President Dick Cheney would have just convicted himself.

[The Washington Post]
Iraq has ordered hundreds of private security guards linked to Blackwater Worldwide to leave the country within seven days or face possible arrest on visa violations. The order comes in the wake of a U.S. judge's dismissal of criminal charges against five Blackwater guards who were accused in the September 2007 shooting deaths of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad.

[Miller-McCune]
The study of decaying presidential popularity finds Barack Obama’s large point decline in his first year fits into the pattern of all recent chief executives.

[ProPublica]
Republicans send out a "Census" form that’s really a fundraiser.

[The Washington Post]
The federal government is encouraging farmers to spread a chalky waste from coal-fired power plants on their fields to loosen and fertilize soil even as it considers regulating coal wastes for the first time.

[The New York Times]
The Obama administration will begin a drive this week to expel Pepsi, French fries and Snickers bars from the nation’s schools in hopes of reducing the number of children who get fat during their school years.

[Telegraph.co.uk]
Labour has introduced 14,300 new offences since taking office in 1997, with Gordon Brown's administration inventing crimes at a rate of more than one a day.

[cnet news]
The FBI is pressing internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years.

[USA Today]
In a case that could have far-reaching implications for medical research and health care based on genetics, groups representing thousands of doctors, scientists and patients went to court to argue that no one should be able to patent human genes.

[Daily Kos]
Some telling survey results from self-identified Republicans.

[Wired]
The Defense Department just released its king-sized, $708 billion budget for the next fiscal year. Much of the proposed spending is fairly detailed—noting exactly how many helicopters the Pentagon plans to buy and how many troops it plans on playing. But about $56 billion goes simply to “classified programs,” or to projects known only by their code names, like “Chalk Eagle” and “Link Plumeria.” That’s the Pentagon’s black budget.

[The Chronicle of Higher Education]
If current trends persist, the sheer amount of poetry "published" is likely to double, quadruple, "ten-tuple" in the decades ahead.

[Guardian.co.uk]
Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, The Guardian asks authors for their personal dos and don'ts.

[Web Urbanist]
79 unique and awesome underwater sculptures.

[Paliban Daily]
A new study shows that increased religiosity is linked tightly with increased racism. Researchers believe this is because of the “us” vs. “them” mindset inherent in religion.

[The New Yorker]
There are really two American economies: one that’s getting more productive and one that’s not.

[TG Daily]
New research into brain-damaged patients has shown that damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions brings on spiritual feelings.

[The Chronicle of Higher Education]
The Big Lie about the "Life of the Mind."

[stltoday.com]
A case currently before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California could establish that some faiths are indeed more equal than others—and that minority faiths are not entitled to First-Amendment protection.

[Freebase]
A global community creating the definitive open database of people, places, and things.

[fictiondb]
A reader's resource for authors and books.

[CBS2Chicago]
Conservative activist equates atheist sign with hate speech in lawsuit.

[USA Today]
Silicon Valley start-up Bloom Energy has unveiled a fuel-cell product that can power a small office building. It expects to have home systems within a decade that are about the size of a loaf of bread.

[Scientific American]
Will artificial photosynthesis power the world?

[PNAS]
Thalamic deactivation at sleep onset precedes that of the cerebral cortex in humans. Thus, asynchronous thalamo-cortical deactivation while falling asleep probably explains the production of hypnagogic hallucinations by a still-activated cortex and the common self-overestimation of the time needed to fall asleep.

[BBC News]
A nap during the day doesn't just beat tiredness, but actually improves the brain's ability to absorb new information.

[BBC News]
An ultrasound scanner the size of a large mobile phone has been launched in Europe and North America. It looks like a cross between a flip-top phone and the medical scanner used by Dr. McCoy in the TV series Star Trek.

[Yahoo! News]
A Danish biotechnology company has developed a new enzyme which it said will make it possible to turn agricultural waste into biofuel at a competitive price.

[The Wall Street Journal]
A debate on the pros and cons of commercializing the cosmos.

[Science Daily]
Researchers have found a specific protein called disabled-2 (Dab2) that switches on the process that releases cancer cells from the original tumor and allows the cells to spread and develop into new tumors in other parts of the body.

[h+]
How long till human-level AI?

[NewScientist]
While physicists struggle to get quantum computers to function at cryogenic temperatures, other researchers are saying that humble algae and bacteria may have been performing quantum calculations at life-friendly temperatures for billions of years.

[Times Online]
New brain study techniques confirm that we don’t just understand words, we feel them.

[NewScientist]
Our world may be a giant hologram.

[NewScientist]
In a new twist on an old illusion, people have been made to feel an "imaginary rabbit" hopping along a stick resting between their fingers.

[Science Daily]
Quantum computing leap forward: altering a lone electron without disturbing its neighbors.

[The Vancouver Sun]
Sea ice in Canada’s fragile Arctic is melting faster than anyone expected, says the lead investigator in Canada’s largest climate-change study yet, raising the possibility that the Arctic could, in a worst-case scenario, be ice-free in about three years.

[Technology Review]
First, they teleported photons, then atoms and ions. Now one physicist has worked out how to do it with energy, a technique that has profound implications for the future of physics.

[Popular Mechanics]
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania unveiled the world's first solar-powered circuit in a January edition of ACS Nano. The technology shows particular promise for touchscreen devices, which could use the circuits as a direct source for sun-power. Not to be confused with solar cells, which convert sunlight energy to electricity and store it for later, this breakthrough involves circuits—electrical devices that provide paths for electricity to flow. This means that sunlight absorbed by the device can immediately use the energy to power the device.

[Technology Review]
IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. The prototype devices, made from atom-thick sheets of carbon, operate at 100 gigahertz—meaning they can switch on and off 100 billion times each second, about 10 times as fast as the speediest silicon transistors.

[PhysOrg.com]
MIT researchers have demonstrated the first laser built from germanium that can produce wavelengths of light useful for optical communication. It’s also the first germanium laser to operate at room temperature. Unlike the materials typically used in lasers, germanium is easy to incorporate into existing processes for manufacturing silicon chips.

[LLNL]
The first experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) have demonstrated a unique physics effect that bodes well for NIF’s success in generating a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction.

[NPR]
Study finds robots can evolve too.

[PhysOrg.com]
Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything.

[The New York Times]
Forests in the eastern United States appear to be growing faster in response to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a new study has found.

[BBC News]
Taking a daily fish oil capsule can stave off mental illness in those at highest risk, trial findings suggest.

[The New York Times]
President Obama is calling on NASA to cancel the program that was to return humans to the Moon by 2020, and focus instead on radically new space technologies.