He has a love for numbers, but not if they come with a dollar sign attached.

Grigory Perelman’s mathematical genius won the reclusive Russian a $1 million prize for solving what had been seen as the world’s hardest problem. On Thursday, he turned it down.

In 2006, Perelman was due to collect the equivalent of $14,000 in Canadian dollars as the recipient of the Fields Medal, considered math’s Nobel Prize. He turned it down.

In 1996, he was awarded a prize by the European Congress of Mathematicians. Yes, that’s right: He turned it down.

He rejected the Clay Mathematics Institute’s $1 million because he thought it was unfair and “unjust,” saying that a U.S. mathematician deserved as much credit as he did, the Interfax news agency said.

The Cambridge, Mass., institute posted his rejection on its website and said it would wait until the fall before deciding what to do with the money.

Perelman’s fame is due to his solving a riddle that has had mathematicians scratching their heads since 1904, when the Frenchman Henri Poincare posited that a three-dimensional sphere is the only such space that doesn’t have holes.

The Russian attracted attention in 2003 when he posted papers on the Internet that later turned out to be proof of Poincare’s theory. But Perelman refuses to take all the credit, saying he had built on the work of a Columbia University professor, Richard Hamilton.

The president of the Clay Institute, James Carlson, said that he had spoken with Perelman by phone and that he was, “as usual, quite pleasant” but “firm in his decision” not to accept its prize, The New York Times reported.

According to Interfax, Perelman said, “To put it short, the main reason is my disagreement with the organized mathematical community. I don’t like their decisions. I consider them unjust.” Read More..

Written by Bryan Nelson

The current rate of extinction is 100 to 1000 times higher than the average, or background rate, making our current period the 6th major mass extinction in the planet’s history.

Although fossil reconstructions or pictorial representations can sometimes be difficult to connect with, it’s impossible to ignore the experience of seeing a photograph of an animal on the brink of extinction.

Thus, what follows is a list of 11 extinct animals that were photographed while still alive.

Tasmanian Tiger

The last Tasmanian Tiger, or Thylacine, known to have existed died in the Hobart Zoo, in Tasmania, Australia, on September 7th, 1936. Read the full story

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. Read the full story

(NaturalNews) The CDC is engaged in a very clever, statistically devious spin campaign, and nearly every journalist in the mainstream media has fallen for its ploy. No one has yet reported what I’m about to reveal here.

It all started with the CDC’s recent release of new statistics about swine flu fatalities, infection rates and vaccination rates. According to the CDC:

• 61 million Americans were vaccinated against swine flu (about 20% of the U.S. population). The CDC calls this a “success” even though it means 4 out of 5 people rejected the vaccines. Read the full story

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A bill seeking to legalize marijuana in California won initial approval from a legislative committee Tuesday in what may be a purely symbolic vote because a second committee likely won’t take it up in time.

The state Assembly’s public safety committee voted 4-3 on the measure that would tax and regulate marijuana in the same way alcohol is controlled.

But the health committee also must approve the measure by Friday before the full Assembly can consider it, an unlikely scenario. Read the full story

As of 01/12/2010 here’s how our President has done:

Take a look at the website:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/

Dec. 18, 2009 – Autism disorders increased by 57% in just four years, the CDC today reported.

By the end of 2006, one in 110 U.S. kids had an autism disorder diagnosed by age 8: one in 70 boys and one in 315 girls, reflecting a nearly fivefold higher risk for males.

The new CDC estimate of autism prevalence, obtained from analysis of child evaluation records in 11 states, is virtually identical to autism numbers reported for 2007 from a huge telephone survey reported last October. Read the full story

The latest calculation of the National Debt as posted by the Treasury Department has – at least numerically – exceeded the statutory Debt Limit approved by Congress last February as part of the Recovery Act stimulus bill.

The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.

A senior Treasury official told CBS News that the department has some “extraordinary accounting tools” it can use to give the government breathing room in the range of $150-billion when the Debt exceeds the Debt Ceiling. Read the full story

The Federal Government will introduce compulsory internet filtering to block overseas sites which contain criminal content, including child sex abuse and sexual violence.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced the changes today following a controversial trial to filter the internet which was conducted earlier this year.

Senator Conroy says some internet content is simply not suitable in a civilised society.

“It is important that all Australians, particularly young children, are protected from this material,” he said. Read the full story

Tiger Woods isn’t just America’s greatest golfer, and he isn’t just America’s greatest philanderer. He’s also America’s greatest vocabulary teacher.

Woods hasn’t yet spoken publicly in the two weeks since his mysterious car accident led to a media feeding frenzy about his sex life. But he has issued a couple of public statements on TigerWoods.com, and in those statements he showed a grasp of the English language that was apparently too difficult for some. Read the full story

Do you know why Richard Branson was in such a hurry to unveil SpaceShipTwo last week? It’s not because he loves cool toys — it’s because he was worried an inventor who’s created a personal UFO would steal his thunder.

Or at least, that’s what a new press release from UFO guru Luke Fortune claims. Fortune, an inventor, has put the plans and patents to allow you to build your own laser-fusion-powered UFO online for free. Read the full story

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story. Read the full story

By placing electrode grids inside patients’ skulls, researchers at the Mayo Clinic have created a way for people to type words using only their brainwaves. It’s a major breakthrough for brain-computer interface research.

The experiments were undertaken on patients who already had electrodes in their brain to monitor epilepsy. Readings were taken via electrocorticography (ECoG), as the subjects were shown a grid of letters and numbers. As each symbol was illuminated, the patient was told to focus on the letter or number, and data was recorded. Once this calibration data was taken, the patients would think of a letter or number, and their brain waves would be appropriately translated to the screen. The theory is that this technique will allow people to communicate and type far more easily when they suffer from Lou Gehrig’s disease, MS, or paralysis. 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

In a spectacular snafu, the Transportation Security Administration stupidly posted an entire airport screening procedures manual on a government website. The 93-page document included details on special screening rules for diplomats, CIA and law enforcement officers; a list of items for which screening is not required (like wheelchairs, casts, orthopedic shoes); and the fun fact that during peak travel times, TSA screeners who check IDs only use black lights to authenticate 25% of documents. Some of these secrets were revealed because, apparently, somebody erroneously believed they were redacted. But The Wandering Aramean blog, which discovered the oopsy, explains why that didn’t work:

They apparently don’t understand how redaction works in the electronic document world. See, rather than actually removing the offending text from the document they just drew a black box on top of it. Turns out that PDF documents don’t really care about the black box like that and the actual content of the document is still in the file. Read the full story

2009 will go down as the beginning of the end of the United States drug war. I have worked at the Drug Policy Alliance promoting alternatives to the war on drugs for 10 years, and I can say without a doubt that there was more debate and movement toward sensible drug policies this year than in the last 9 years combined! Here are 10 stories that contributed to the unprecedented momentum to end America’s longest running war.

1) Three Former Latin American Presidents Call Drug War a Failure (February) 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