The Official Google Blog:
SearchWiki: make search your own  —  Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results?  Maybe you're an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top.  Or perhaps it's not there at all and you'd like to add it.

Giant glaciers buried under the surface of Mars at much lower latitudes than any previously known ice are a potential source of drinking water for future astronauts. The discovery, made using ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, offers new...

Today, Ted Stevens — Alaska’s defeated Republican senator and a convicted felon — was granted time on the Senate floor to deliver his farewell speech. Stevens said that he still can’t believe that he’s “privileged to speak on the floor of the United States Senate.” He also added that he “doesn’t have a rear-view mirror. [...]

The Politico:
Senate GOP in big funk  —  A day after losing Ted Stevens' seat, along with their best hope for getting Joe Lieberman to cross over, Senate GOP leaders preached party unity as the key to surviving the Obama years.  —  If that doesn't work, there's always psychotherapy.

AP - Researchers said Thursday they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus by comparing DNA from a skeleton and hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer's books.

CNN’s Rick Sanchez highlighted yesterday that during last weekend’s G20 Economic Summit, leaders from around the world refused to acknowledge or shake hands with President Bush as they walked on stage for a photo-op. As Sanchez explained, everyone was “greeting each other and shaking hands, but Bush walks with his head down like the dejected [...]

AP - Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, an early Barack Obama supporter from the southwestern part of the country, is the likely choice for the job of secretary of homeland security, a top Obama adviser said Thursday.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano has been chosen to be secretary of the vast and troubled Department of Homeland Security.

For the first time, astronomers have taken a visual image of a multiple-planet solar system beyond our own. Using the Gemini North telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, researchers observed in infrared light three planets...

The nuclear waste buried beneath Yucca Mountain will be there for millennia, untouchable and lethal. Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats would put that time and radioactivity to use by turning the dump into a generator of new universes. His plan is...

As the CEOs of Detroit’s Big Three automakers pleaded for a $25 billion bailout from Congress this week, conservatives have been looking for an easy culprit to blame for the auto industry’s seeming collapse. First it was the unions. Now conservatives have turned their attention to the modest fuel economy (CAFE) standards — fleetwide average [...]

Since the GOP’s dismal electoral performance on Nov. 4, many conservatives have been engaged in a massive game of cover-up, arguing that despite the results, America is still a “center-right” country. (But it’s not). During a recent interview with Time magazine, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was the latest to take up the baton, [...]

The Associated Press reports today that, as part of its long-fought campaign to gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the Bush administration is pushing a last-minute regulatory change that would significantly weaken the ESA: The rules would eliminate the input of federal wildlife scientists in some endangered species cases, [by allowing] the federal agency in charge [...]

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka ?Joe the Plumber,? has signed a deal to write a new book entitled ?Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream.? To capitalize on his recent fame, Wurzelbacher is planning to release it on Dec. 1 ? less than two weeks from now. The New York Times reports that the book [...]

New claims for unemployment jumped unexpectedly to a 16-year high last week, the Labor Department reported, with 542,000 new claims for jobless benefits being filed. “Claims above 400,000 are generally considered a sign of recession, and claims have been above that level for 17 weeks,” the AP reports, adding that last year, “claims stood at [...]

This evening, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) took to the Senate floor and paid tribute to Republican senators who lost their re-election bids. While McConnell had plenty of nice words for Norm Coleman, Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu, he never mentioned Ted Stevens, who lost his bid in a tight race after being convicted on [...]

It might not make sense to pull woolly mammoths from the Ice Age into an age of global warming, but resurrecting that lost species became a bit less far-fetched. Using hair from 20,000-year-old specimens preserved in Siberian tundra, an international...

Yesterday, Anchorage mayor Mark Begich was declared the winner in Alaska’s tight U.S. Senate race, defeating Ted Stevens’s hopes of coming back for a seventh term. As the AP notes, “Tuesday’s tally of just over 24,000 absentee and other ballots gave Begich 146,286, or 47.56 percent, to 143,912, or 46.76 percent, for Stevens.” A big [...]

A new experiment may have found the first direct evidence of dark matter particles, a discovery that could begin to unravel one of the biggest mysteries in physics. Theorists believe that dark matter, made up of of weakly-interacting massive particles,...