An automated stock-trading program accidentally flooded the market with millions of trades Wednesday morning, spreading turmoil across Wall Street and drawing renewed attention to the fragility and instability of the nation’s stock markets.

While the markets quickly recovered, it was the latest black eye for the financial markets and suggests that regulators have not been able to curb the market disruptions that have led to frequent halts in trading and wild swings in shares.

Wednesday’s debacle follows the botched Facebook initial public offering on Nasdaq in May and the aborted effort by another exchange, BATS Global Markets, to bring its own stock public on its own exchange. The episodes have further rattled the confidence of investors and stoked suspicions that markets are unsafe for savings.

‘The machines have taken over, right?

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If you’ve ever wondered how Monsanto

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JOHANNESBURG — Poisoned-tipped arrows and jewelry made of ostrich egg beads found in South Africa show modern culture may have emerged about 30,000 years earlier in the area than previously thought, according to two articles published on Monday.

The findings published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ show that the 44,000-year-old artifacts are characteristic of the San hunter-gatherers. The descendants of San people live today in southern Africa, so the items can clearly be traced forward to modern culture, unlike other archaeological finds, researchers said.

South African researcher Lucinda Backwell said the findings are the earliest known instances of ‘modern behavior as we know it.’ Backwell said the discovery reinforces the theory that modern man came from southern Africa.

The carbon dating on the items shows that traces of the San culture may have existed earlier than the previous estimate of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, the journal said.

The find, discovered at Border Cave close to South Africa’s northeastern border with Swaziland, is a comprehensive package of hunting kits and jewelry made of ostrich egg and marine shell beads.

Backwell, who was part of the team of international researchers that made the find, said the artifacts created as […]

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The computer programme developed by researchers at Stanford University is an exact replica of the Mycoplasma genitalium bacterium, including its DNA and all the other components of its single cell.

The scientists hope that the simulation will help them explore the subtleties of how a cell works, unravel the genetic causes of disease, and predict how new therapies could prevent or treat illness.

Prof Markus Covert, who led the study published in the Cell journal, told the BBC: ‘The public hear about a new ‘cancer gene’ being discovered … cancer is not a one-gene problem.

‘There are thousands of factors interacting in very complicated ways and for us to understand a disease like that, we really need to start going back and trying to see if we can understand the whole cell.’

To help understand the complexity of a cell Prof Covert and his team decided to recreate the entire life cycle of M. genitalium, a sexually transmitted parasite, which was chosen for its biological simplicity.

Information about the biology of the bacterium was taken from more than 900 scientific journals and programmed into the computer simulation, with each cell comprising half a gigabyte of data.

The researchers hope the model, which anyone can download, will […]

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If you’re looking to avoid further hormonal freakouts brought on by the hated Bisphenol A (BPA [3]) — a frightening endocrine disruptor [4] reportedly found in 96 percent of women but consumed more by their children, then you might want to clean out your wallet. Or perhaps forego shopping receipts altogether until you hear otherwise from conclusive scientific studies — which could take many years to straggle in.

Two years ago, Canada became the first country to outright declare BPA, a controversially toxic compound for polycarbonate polymers and epoxy resins found in everyday plastics and other products, a toxic substance unsuitable for the First World. More recently, laggards like the European Union, the United States and more have banned it from baby bottles, but not everything else. That includes the thousands of point-of-sale thermal receipts [5] ripped daily from cash registers, gas stations and other places too numerous to count, unless you’re a scientist studying the toxicity of BPA or its less-known substitute Bisphenol S (BPS [6]) in those receipts and resins.

It should be by now common knowledge that BPA secretes enough weak estrogen to influence serious developmental and neurological deformities and diseases, such as the congenital defect hypospadias […]

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