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Top novelists look to ebooks to challenge the rules of fiction | Books | The Observer
Online fiction is a remote world, peopled by elves, dragons and whey-faced vampires. At least that is the view shared by millions of devoted readers of the printed novel. But now serious British literary talent is aiming to colonise territory occupied until now by fantasy authors and amateur fan-fiction writers.
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BBC News – London to host Formula E electric car race in 2014
London has been selected to host a race in the debut Formula E series, which will see electric cars race around major world cities.
Rome, Miami, Beijing and Rio de Janeiro are also among the eight cities so far named as sites for races in 2014.
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Civil war sailors from USS Monitor buried at Arlington – in pictures | World news | guardian.co.uk
A century and a half after the ironclad USS Monitor went down in a storm, two of its sailors were interred with full military honours on Friday at Arlington national cemetery in Virginia. The sailors were discovered when the ironclad’s turret was recovered in 2002, and nearly 100 people who have a distant familial tie to the 16 Union sailors who died when the ship went down were invited to attend the funeral. It is likely to be the last time civil war remains are interred at the cemetery
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‘Hockey stick’ climate graph gets more dramatic (Wired UK)
In the extended timeframe, Marcott found that temperatures in about 20 percent of this time were higher than they are today. However, a six-thousand-year cooling trend has been dramatically halted in the space of a very short timeframe; temperatures have never changed as fast as they’re changing today.
“What we found is that temperatures increased in the last hundred years as much as they had cooled in the last six or seven thousand,” he said. “In other words, the rate of change is much greater than anything we’ve seen in the whole Holocene [the current geological epoch, which started around 12,000 years ago].”
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MakerBot unveils ‘Digitizer’ 3D scanner (Wired UK)
At the SxSW conference in Austin, Texas, 3D printer manufacturer MakerBot has announced a 3D scanner called the “Digitizer”.
The desktop-sized device uses cameras and lasers to scan objects and create digital files that can then be used to replicate the object exactly using one of MakerBot’s digital printers.
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Sacked: the corgi which disobeyed Dame Helen Mirren – Telegraph
It is the hit West End show that is delighting critics and the public alike.
But behind the scenes of The Audience, which stars Dame Helen Mirren as the Queen, it has not all been running as smoothly as it appears on stage, with producers forced to sack one of the cast just days before opening night.
Lizzy, an appropriately regally-named corgi, had to go because of its refusal to obey the commands of its co-star, Dame Helen.
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BBC News – China fishes 900 dead pigs out of Shanghai river
An inquiry has been launched in China after more than 900 dead pigs were found floating in a river near the eastern city of Shanghai.
No evidence has been found that the animals in the Huangpu river were dumped there or died of any animal epidemic, officials say.
But measures are being taken to monitor the quality of the water.
The authorities are trying to establish where the animals came from, after they appeared in the river on Friday.
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