I think I'm going into a diet

A Web page labeled "Ana Boot Camp" recently offered its members a seemingly irresistible proposition: a 30-day regimen designed to help them drop some serious pounds, no exercise needed. The catch was that the group's members were to vary their daily caloric intake from 500 (less than half the daily minimum requirement for women recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine) to zero. They were supposed to track their progress, fast to make up for the days they accidentally "overate" and support each other as they worked toward their common goal of radical weight loss.

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The true face of the Muslim

The attacks targeted the heart of India's financial district, but the shock waves were felt around the globe. On Wednesday, a group of heavily armed assailants carried out a series of coordinated strikes in Mumbai —killing at least 80, wounding hundreds more, and claiming an indeterminate number of hostages. A group calling themselves the Deccan Mujahedeen claimed responsibility for the mayhem, but their identity could not be immediately confirmed, and many terrorism  specialists said they were unfamiliar with the name. Whoever did it took aim at Western passport-holders and prominent targets; among the locations hit were two major hotels, a train station and a hospital. Several top Indian security officials were among the casualties.

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There is a movie, right?

"The butterfly effect" is a phrase that came to Hollywood and our culture from chaos theory and the abstract mathematical models of Edward Lorenz. The idea is that even the smallest alteration of the first cause in a series can produce a vast change in the final result. So in theory the slight alteration of the tiny breeze caused by a butterfly's wing could eventually change the course of a great hurricane. That is the theory. It always sounded ridiculous to me, until now.

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Now, this is interesting:

It's a question that Genevieve Hartman  has been rolling over in her mind for some time now. The 28-year-old vegetarian will be spending Thanksgiving at her boyfriend's professor's house in New York City. Thanksgiving used to be one of Hartman's favorite holidays , when she celebrated it with her vegetarian family in San Francisco. But ever since she moved to New York five years ago and began spending the holiday with relatives or friends, it's been a source of anxiety. Take the tofu dilemma: on the one hand, she doesn't want to get stranded at a turkey-heavy table without anything to eat, which might make her hosts feel bad. But she also doesn't want to bring attention to herself as needing "special foods," increasing the likelihood that she'll have to field questions about why she's skipping the turkey.

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Would you apply to this job?

There's an e-mail making the rounds with a job description attached. If you apply, be warned: you will be burdened with "challenging" tasks "in an often chaotic environment" with "variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends and frequent 24-hour shifts on call." You must be "willing to be hated, at least temporarily." Oh, and you'd better love kids, because that's who you'll be working with all day. The job, of course, is "parent"—but it might as well be "pediatrician," which requires a lot of the same skills and then some. That's why lately I've been feeling sorry for pediatrics residents. They're often too busy wiping the noses and taking the temperatures of other people's kids to do likewise for their own.

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The future of electricity

Batteries still won't evolve as quickly as computer-based technologies. The reason: a battery is based on a chemical reaction, which is limited by the laws of physics and the periodic table. Since Italy's Alessandro Volta first came up with the idea in 1800, batteries have generated electricity using the same basic principle.

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Modern Pirates, can you believe in that?

It's a scene out of another century. On Tuesday night an Indian Navy vessel in the Gulf of Aden approached a ship thought to be manned by pirates operating from lawless Somalia . Although it was dark, Indian officers told news-agency reporters that they could see crew members on deck brandishing guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Volleys were fired, fire broke out on one of the pirate ships, and it sank. The crew escaped in a speed boat, the Navy ship in hot pursuit .

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