A joint venture between the UK’s Shell and Malaysia’s Petronas oil companies has won the right to develop Iraq’s giant Majnoon oil field.

A total of 44 companies took part in a bid for 10 fields in the second such auction since the invasion in 2003.

Shell and Petronas beat a rival bid from France’s Total and China’s CNPC. Read the full story

December 11, 2009–In the black depths of the frigid Arctic Ocean, scientists on a 2005 expedition found a splash of color: The brilliant, blood-red Crossota norvegica jellyfish (pictured). Read the full story

When choosing between a degree and going to work, paying rent, buying groceries or supporting family members, many students are forced to drop out, said Jean Johnson of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public policy research firm that conducted a telephone survey of more than 600 people ages 22 to 30 for the report.

The research reflects a “very, very different reality” than the common image most people have of college as “a place where a young person goes and they become an adult,” Johnson said. “So many of them are already assuming adult responsibilities.” Read the full story

SANTIAGO: A judge has ruled that the former Chilean president Eduardo Frei Montalva was assassinated nearly 30 years ago and the murder covered up by people linked to the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Frei, who preceded Salvador Allende as Chile’s president and later became a leading critic of the military dictatorship, died in 1982. An autopsy report blamed septic shock after stomach hernia surgery, but a new autopsy made public this year by University of Chile pathologists identified two chemicals in his body that attack the digestive system. One of them is used in mustard gas and the other is found in rat poison. Read the full story

Just as the Manhattan Project was conceived in 1942 to beat the Germans to the atomic bomb during World War II, the “Manhattan Beach Project” was founded as an “all-out assault on the world’s biggest killer – aging,” according to project organizer David A. Kekich.

An end to aging may be just as explosive as the atomic blast that occurred at Alamogordo, New Mexico during the predawn hours of July 16, 1945. It’s serious enough that members of the Obama Administration consider it to be one of the major global destabilizing forces of the next 25 years. It will require the political mastery of a scientific and societal transition built around the Nano-Info-Bio-Cogno (NBIC) roadmap.

After nine years of research and collaboration, a group of entrepreneurs and scientists – many known to h+ readers –- are disclosing their plan “to start saving up to 100,000 lives lost to aging every day, by 2029.” A Longevity Summit in November 2009 — organized by Kekich — brought together a number of researchers on human aging and longevity for a discussion on the state-of-the-art research, the implications of their discoveries, and round table, cross-disciplinary discussions that may lead to new and accelerated results. Here’s a video of Kekich explaining the project: Read the full story

It’s a classic tale of how mediocrity is maintained. Evolutionary biologists in California have discovered that when males shower attractive females with attention, it actually undermines those females’ fitness as mothers. That means fit females don’t pass their genes on.

Today PLoS Biology published a study of fruitflies, a species where the male flies show a marked preference for mating with larger females because they are more fecund. The problem is that the males show such aggressive preferences that they basically badger the females constantly to mate. What this means is that the females are so harried that they have less time to search for food, which degrades their health. Also, among fruitflies, the mating process is itself damaging to the health of the females – fruitfly sperm is toxic. Read the full story

In September, ladymag Marieclaire ruffled some feathers when it published a piece about women who smoke weed. But its most interesting effect was not the “marijuana moms” chatter it unleashed, and instead the fact that it brought to the mainstream media a more open discussion of the fact that women can be avid tokers, too.

Public acceptance of pot is at an all-time high, and the fact that women have drastically changed their attitudes may be what is most fascinating about the sea change in public opinion — and policy — regarding marijuana. In 2005, only 32 percent of polled women told Gallup they approved legalizing pot, but this year 44 percent of them were for it, compared to 45 percent of men. In effect, women have narrowed what had been a 12-point gender gap. Read the full story

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J. – All canned Slim Fast drinks are being voluntarily recalled by the company over fears of bacterial contamination that could cause diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. The recall affects all 10 million products currently on the market.

The products could possibly be contaminated with the microorganism Bacillus cereus. Unilever says the probability of serious health problems is remote, and the Food and Drug Administration says there have been no deaths or injuries associated with the recall.

An unknown number of people have gotten sick about six to 15 hours after consuming the diet drink, but have recovered within about 24 hours. Read the full story

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is quickly making up for lost time: The first scientific results from the recently restarted particle accelerator have been announced—about two weeks ahead of schedule.

During the first collisions of the LHC’s twin beams of protons, a machine called A Large Ion Collider Experiment, or ALICE, collected the results from a proton-proton smashup. Read the full story

WASHINGTON — A third of the most popular children’s toys in the United States this year contain harmful chemicals including lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury, a US consumer group said Wednesday.

The Ecology Center, which published its findings on the website HealthyStuff.org, tested nearly 700 toys ahead of the Christmas shopping season and found that 32 percent contained one or more toxic chemical. Read the full story

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public. Read the full story

The mechanics of slowing light down, as well as speeding it up, is governed by methods and equations that are pretty well understood. Now scientists just have to figure out what to do with it.

Most people learn in physics class that light goes one speed: faster than anything else. Because of its long, rich history, this 300 million meters per second is generally treated as an established fact. In the last few decades, though, scientists have been playing around with light’s speed. But, as that history noted, researchers have started playing around with exceptions, based on the premise that “nothing in normal space can go faster than light, but if you can do funny things to space, you can go faster than light.” Read the full story

1. Don’t

2. Drive slower

3. Don’t tail gate. And don’t drive beside people.

4. Beware of bridges (over and under), declines, and inclines.

5. If you lose traction and there is snow nearby, try to veer toward the snow gently. Read the full story

Decorated Veteran, 90, Fights to Raise Flag in His Yard

A veteran of three wars who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor is now facing an unlikely enemy — his neighbors.

Col. Van T. Barfoot, 90, has raised the Stars and Stripes every day at sunrise and lowered them every day at sunset since he served in the U.S. Army. But on Tuesday he received a letter from the law firm that represents his homeowners’ association, ordering him to remove the flagpole from his Richmond, Va. yard by 5 p.m. on Friday or face “legal action.” Read the full story

Deadly job? Funeral workers risk cancer

High rate of leukemia in undertakers using formaldehyde for embalming

WASHINGTON – Morticians who use formaldehyde to embalm bodies have a higher risk of leukemia, researchers reported on Friday.

They found deaths from one particular kind of leukemia, myeloid leukemia, increased the longer the workers were involved with embalming.

Their study of more than 400 funeral workers is the first to look carefully at the association, they reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Read the full story

Homeless brothers in line to inherit billions

Hungarian cave-dwellers could split grandmother’s $6.6 billion fortune

BUDAPEST, Hungary – Talk about a reversal of fortunes.

Two brothers who are so poor they live in a cave on the outskirts of Budapest and get by selling scavenged junk are in line to receive a $6.6 billion inheritance from a long-lost grandmother, the U.K. Daily Telegraph reports.

Zsolt and Geza Peladi have been informed that they are entitled to the fortune, along with a sister who lives in the United States, the newspaper reported Wednesday. Read the full story

If you’re in Chicago, then you might want to head over to the Adler planetarium today, when they unveil an enormous 2.5 billion pixel mosaic of the Galaxy! It’s composed of 800,000 separate Spitzer Space Telescope images (I mean, c’mon, holy Haleakala, eight hundred thousand images!) stitched together. The image was actually released last year, but the ginormous print version is premiering at Adler today.

The image above is one very tiny piece of the mosaic; it was originally about 6000 pixels across, and I shrunk it down by a factor of 10 to fit it here on the blog. And that is still only an eensy weensy piece of the whole thing!

The images are in the infrared, well outside what the eye can see. The colors represent IR light at 3.6, 8, and 24 microns (depicted in the picture as blue, green, and red). Different objects emit at different wavelengths: warm dust is red, while nebulae forming stars are yellow. The diffuse green glow seen everywhere in the image is from complex organic molecules called PAHs, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. On Earth those are created when fossil fuels are burned; in space, they are byproducts of stellar birth and death. Read the full story