[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.

[Salon.com]
Countries which have been victimized by horrific terrorist attacks over the last several years—Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia—have tried and convicted the perpetrators as criminals in their civilian court system, right in their normal courthouses, in the heart of the cities that were the target of the attacks. These countries—which aren't protected by oceans and (in the case of India and Indonesia) aren't bordered by friendly countries—didn't invent special military commissions to abridge due process or simply imprison the accused without a trial. They didn't pour water down their throats, freeze them, disorient them with sleep deprivation, or hang them naked from the ceiling. Instead, they followed the Reagan administration's policy for dealing with Terrorists—"use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them"—despite the fact that they had suffered deadly attacks.

[BBC News]
Why do people often vote against their own interests?

[Boston Review]
Misreading Muslim immigration in Europe.

[ars technica]
Could P2P blocking be legalized by new net neutrality rules?

[Salon]
But the freeze is more notable for what it excludes than what it includes. For now, it does not include the largest domestic spending programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And all "security-related programs" are also exempted from the freeze, which means it does not apply to military spending, the intelligence budget, the Surveillance State, or foreign military aid. As always, the notion of decreasing the deficit and national debt through reductions in military spending is one of the most absolute Washington taboos. What possible rationale is there for that?

[CNN]
In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

[The New York Times]
President Obama has endorsed a Senate bill to create a bipartisan budget commission, whose recommendations for slashing deficits would have to be voted on by Congress. But he remained ready to establish a panel by executive order if the effort to do so by law fails even with his support.

[EFF]
Court rules that mass surveillance of Americans is immune from judicial review.

[Financial Times]
In a sweeping decision that will change the face of the 2010 US mid-term election and beyond, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision on Thursday to lift limits on corporate spending in campaigns. The long-awaited decision is expected to open the floodgates on corporate money in elections, reversing restrictions that have been in place since the 1940s that prohibited corporations from buying campaign ads from their own treasuries. It also reversed rules that prevented corporations from explicitly supporting candidates in campaign ads.

[ABC News]
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the U.S. military.

[FiveThirtyEight]
The skies are as friendly as ever: 9/11, Al Qaeda obscure statistics on airline safety.

[Mother Jones]
A year after the biggest bailout in US history, Wall Street lobbyists don't just have influence in Washington. They own it lock, stock, and barrel.

[Mother Jones]
The price tag for the Wall Street bailout is often put at $700 billion—the size of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But TARP is just the best known program in an array of more than 30 overseen by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve that have paid out or put aside money to bail out financial firms and inject money into the markets. The real cost of the bailout is around $14 trillion.

[The Wall Street Journal]
The nation's banks will be bombarding customers with new fees and products in 2010 as they try to replace more than $50 billion in revenue wiped out by new rules that clamp down on certain business practices.

[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.

[Mother Jones]
Lit mags were once launching pads for great writers and big ideas. Is it time to write them off?

[Guernica]
Covering Haiti: When the media is the disaster.

[SPD]
Small Press Distribution's poetry bestsellers for 2000-2009.

[Poetry Foundation]
How has poetry changed in the past ten years?

[Forbes]
It's the arrangement of the words that counts.

[The Independent]
We don't need this culture of overwork.

[The Public Domain]
Book burning, as done by lawyers.

[OnlineUniversities.com]
75 books every writer should read.

[The Atlantic]
One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It's that newspaper articles are too long.

[Edge]
How has the internet changed the way you think?

[Washington Monthly]
How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks.

[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.

[ScienceDaily]
Lead may be the culprit in ADHD.

[Brain Mysteries]
New research finds that an increase in brain magnesium improves learning and memory in young and old rats.

[EFF]
Is your browser configuration rare or unique? If so, web sites may be able to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies.

[The New York Review of Books]
The chess master and the computer.

[Guardian.co.uk]
Neuroscientists at Cambridge University have shown that running stimulates the brain to grow fresh grey matter and has a big impact on mental ability.

[ScienceDaily]
Transplanted neurons grown from embryonic stem cells can fully integrate into the brains of young animals, according to new research.

[Engadget]
Tesla pulls in $465 million government loan to build Model S electric sedan.

[Popular Mechanics]
The "uncanny valley" is unscientific bunk.

[NewScientist]
Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a prominent and internationally respected string theorist, argues that gravitational attraction could be the result of the way information about material objects is organised in space.

[The New York Times]
In a shift of position, the Food and Drug Administration is expressing concerns about possible health risks from bisphenol-A, or BPA, a widely used component of plastic bottles and food packaging that it declared safe in 2008.

[AlterNet]
Residential solar leases offer a no-money-down, low-monthly plan that makes solar electricity cheaper than the stuff we get by wire—and you don't have to buy the panels.

[Grist]
Scientists confirm link between BPA and heart disease in humans.

[BLDG BLOG]
The sad state of Biosphere 2.