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Hunters in many states have been warned not to eat deer or elk meat, since it can be contaminated with chronic wasting disease (CWD), a version of Mad Cow Disease, which can be transferred to humans who eat the meat. Mad Cow was spread by farmers grinding up cow bones and feeding them to cattle, but how does CWD spread in wild animals? The answer may be that prions stay alive in the dirt.

Prions are the infectious proteins that spread the disease and researchers have found that they’re more likely to live some types of soil than in others, which may be why some areas of the country are affected, while others aren’t. CWD was first detected in deer and elk in Colorado and Wyoming in the 1980s, and in Wisconsin in 2002.
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It’s not just the big asteroids we have to watch out for?the little rocks can be dangerous too. They’re hundreds of them out there and they’re hard to spot, but NASA has decided it had better start searching for them.

Robert Roy Britt writes in Space.com that it will cost at least $236 million to add a search for small asteroids to their ongoing Near Earth Object (NEO) detection program. An asteroid twice the size of a football field or bigger hits the Earth about every 15,000 to 20,000 years, according to NASA’s Donald Yeomans. Impacts from smaller space rocks cause only regional problems, but these could be severe, and there are so many more of them that this kind of impact is much more likely to occur.
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Most of us eat a little plastic every day, because certain types of plastics leach dangerous chemicals into the food they contain?especially when they’re heated?and these are even made into baby bottles. But scientists are creating edible food wraps made out of fruits and vegetables, so it will soon be safe to not only eat the food, but also the container it comes in.
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A scientist who wishes to remain anonymous says the secret government project HAARP was behind the recent Northeast power blackout. He thinks it might have been a test to see how HAARP could be used as a military weapon, as well as how the U.S. would cope with a terrorist attack on our power grid.

He became suspicious when he noticed that the blackout conveniently started a few minutes after the Wall Street closing bell, so the stock markets were not disrupted. Then he discovered that HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project) was turned that afternoon.
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