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  • A Finnish computer scientist had a dream that a blackbird was speaking to her in human language. So she devised a computer program to transform the sounds of the human voice into birdsong.
  • California's top election official has announced that organizers of a campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom have submitted enough valid signatures to place the question before voters later this year.
  • The memo clarified a law that went into effect earlier this year and is in response to confusion on social media.
  • As the year comes to a close, we take a look at some of the most popular audiobooks of 2025.
  • Facing a declining birthrate, China will allow married couples to have up to three children. This raises the previous ceiling of two children.
  • The Trump-ordered strike on a Baghdad airport killed Iran's top military leader. The move escalates what's already a tense and dangerous situation. Reaction to the general's death has been mixed.
  • American Pharoah will race for the Triple Crown on Saturday. A Belmont victory would make horse-racing history, and his owner will get a nice payday. But the real financial windfall comes later.
  • It was not the color medal the U.S. had hoped for, but it was a better result than at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics when the USWNT was bounced out of the tournament in the quarterfinals.
  • Top level U.S. and European diplomats are visiting Nicaragua urging its president to return to a national dialogue with opposition groups. The pleas come at a time of crackdown on press and protests.
  • In Turkey, the government is touting its donations of medical supplies abroad even though coronavirus is taking a steep toll in Turkey and the economy is on the brink.
  • NPR's David Kestenbaum reports on a possible wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Really. Physicists measuring the fundamental characteristics of a subatomic particle, the muon, have come up with some very puzzling results that could punch a hole in the long-standing "standard model" of how matter is put together. And that could help usher in a completely new theory of matter, time and space. Unless, of course, some scientist has made a mistake. (4:30) (It was later revealed this was a mistake: "Well, I would say I'm responsible for the mistake. My collaborator did most of the work, but I am equally guilty of making mistakes." Toichiro Kinoshita, a physicist at Princeton University. Kinoshita's sin was to have a minus sign where he should have had a plus or maybe the other way around. He can't quite remember, though it ended up having gigantic consequences. Kinoshita and his colleague were calculating how a particular subatomic particle behaves when it's stuck in a magnetic field. The particle, it turns out, wobbles like a toy top at a particular frequency. Kinoshita enlisted hundreds of computers and, after a decade of heroic work, had precisely predicted how fast it should wobble according to the laws of physics. Last winter, other physicists who were out measuring the wobble found it differed significantly from Kinoshita's prediction. In the clockwork world of physics, this was potentially a huge finding, signaling something new and mysterious, except that it wasn't. Kinoshita traced his error to a tiny quirk in a computer program he was using. He hadn't checked that bit, in part because other physicists using a different approach had gotten the same answer."
  • Fuch will leave his post at the end of 2022, saying he has fulfilled commitments he made when he took the helm of the state’s flagship university.
  • Majestic and composed, Chen exulted at the end — shaking off his terrible short performance four years ago at the Pyeongchang Olympics and setting him up to win gold after Thursday's free skate.
  • A top Russian figure skater was allowed to compete despite testing positive for a banned substance before the Games. Kamila Valieva, age 15, helped Russia win the team event earlier this week.
  • As top law enforcement officials prepared to brief the media on the arrest of seven suspected terrorists in Miami, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was otherwise involved. He was meeting with producers and some cast members of the Fox TV counterterrorism show 24.
  • People living near the Susquehanna River in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., are returning to their homes as river waters recede. But flooding still threatens other communities in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and other parts of the Northeast.
  • Ever since the dawn of digital delivery, we've been hearing about how the single-song download is killing the album. But at the Grammy Awards, which take place Sunday night in Los Angeles, there's still a category for Album of the Year. Tom Moon profiles the nominees.
  • Pizza makers in New York are remembering Domenico "Dom" Demarco, the founder of the beloved Brooklyn pizzeria Di Fara, who has died at the age of 85.
  • The Pacific purple sea urchin's appetite for kelp threatens marine ecosystems along the California coast as it ravages the "lungs of the ocean." The solution, biologists say, might be on our plates.
  • Research shows that sleep deprivation makes people emotionally volatile and temperamental — a fact that hasn't escaped the notice of some reality TV producers, who deny contestants sleep in an effort to kick up televised drama.
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