Welcome to the Overnight News Digest
The OND is published each night around midnight, Eastern Time.
The originator of OND was Magnifico.
Current Contributors are ScottyUrb, Bentliberal, wader, Oke, rfall, JML9999 and NeonVincent who also serves as chief cat herder.
Water from thin air: Aussie Ed's Airdrop an international hit
An Australian designer has beaten 500 inventors to win a £10,000 international prize for his beetle-inspired device that is capable of extracting water from even the driest desert air.
With global temperatures continuing to rise and droughts set to become more severe, a device capable of literally pulling water out of thin air is likely to have significant global applications.
Edward Linacre's win for his Airdrop invention is the second year in a row an Australian has won the global James Dyson Award. Last year, the winner was Sydney designer Sam Adeloju, who came up with a life-saving bazooka capable of shooting an emergency flotation device 150 metres out to sea.
theage.com
Obama administration to announce effort to expand health care workforce
By Sarah Kliff, The Washington Post (via Denver Post)
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will announce today as much as $1 billion in funding to hire, train and deploy health care workers, part of the White House's broader "We Can't Wait" agenda to bolster the economy after President Barack Obama's jobs bill stalled in Congress.
Grants can go to doctors, community groups, local government and other organizations that work with patients in federal health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. The funds are for experimenting with different ways to expand the health care workforce while reducing the cost of delivering care. There will be an emphasis on speed, with new programs expected to be running within six months of funding.
Searching for the origins of life... and our future
BBC - Professor Dimitar Sasselov on building a credible picture of alien life - Film footage courtesy of Nasa
Hollywood is wrong about aliens. They don't have oddly shaped heads, bulging eyes or even an eerie green hue. Dimitar Sasselov is pretty convinced of that.
He's not even sure we'll know them when we see them. Prof Sasselov, an astrophysicist, thinks that if life exists elsewhere - and he believes it does - it will likely be based on different building blocks than ours, and so may not even be recognisable as life.
A project he's heading at Harvard University, called the Origins of Life, is trying to imagine what life would be like if it were based on different chemicals, conditions and history than we have on Earth. There's no reason life can only form under our set of circumstances, he says - or at least that's what he thinks and hopes the project will eventually prove.
Occupiers Return: 1,000 marchers converge on Occupy Oakland campsite
sfgate - (11-14) 18:13 PST OAKLAND -- About 1,000 Occupy Oakland protesters marched back to Frank Ogawa Plaza tonight, about 12 hours after police evicted the movement's tent city, and several in the crowd said they intended to re-establish the encampment.
The city reopened the plaza outside City Hall and said protesters could gather there around the clock. However, the city banned camping, and police said they would prevent activists from putting up tents.
Few officers were visible as gave speeches this evening in the plaza's amphitheater. As of 6 p.m., no one had tried to put up a tent, and the main topics of the speeches were denunciations of corporate greed and promises to join UC Berkeley Occupy movement rallies this week.
Pelosi aide: '60 Minutes' report a 'right-wing smear'
Washington -- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's office accused the news program "60 Minutes" of omitting key information from its report Sunday on how members of Congress use privileged information to profit from stock trades.
Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill also called the report "a right-wing smear" based on a new book by conservative author Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University. The book is titled: "Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Jail."
Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, was highlighted in the report with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and House Financial Services chairman Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., among others.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/...
Dozens killed in Syria as Jordan king tells Assad to go
BBC - Dozens of people are reported to have died in continuing unrest across Syria, as the king of neighbouring Jordan urged President Assad to stand down.
In one incident, about 20 troops were killed in a clash with army defectors in a southern town near the Jordan border, activists say.
Earlier, King Abdullah became the first leader to openly urge Mr Assad to quit.
He told the BBC that if he were in Mr Assad's position, he would start talks to ensure an orderly transition.
"I would step down and make sure whoever comes behind me has the ability to change the status quo that we're seeing," King Abdullah stated
Japan farm radioactive levels probed
BBC - New research has found that radioactive material in parts of north-eastern Japan exceeds levels considered safe for farming.
The findings provide the first comprehensive estimates of contamination across Japan following the nuclear accident in 2011.
Food production is likely to be affected, the researchers suggest.
The results are reported in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal.
Cardiac cells 'heal heart damage'
BBC - Stem cells taken from a patient's own heart have, for the first time, been used to repair damaged heart tissue, researchers claim.
The study, published in the Lancet, was designed to test the procedure's safety, but also reported improvements in the heart's ability to pump blood.
The authors said the findings were "very encouraging"
Other experts said techniques with bone marrow stem cells were more advanced and that bigger trials were needed.
The scientists say this is the first reported case of cardiac stem cells being used as a treatment in people after earlier studies had shown benefits in animals.
For Refugees From Syria, a Visit With No Expiration Date
NYT - BOYNUYOGUN, Turkey — The Turkish government describes the refugee camp here as a “temporary residence” for the country’s Syrian guests, but very little about it looks temporary.
Erected only four months ago on agricultural land, Boynuyogun camp is lined with paved roads and sidewalks of neatly interlocking cobblestones. Young people play on three broad, pebble-strewn sports fields, where on a recent day uniformed Turkish soldiers hit a volleyball back and forth with laughing children.
A row of free phones stands near the camp entrance, and even the tents, arranged in neat columns, have electric lighting. There is a well-staffed field hospital and a tent schoolhouse adorned with colorful construction-paper projects made by kindergartners and equipped with a computer lab and a faculty conference room.
More than 19,000 Syrians have fled to Turkey since a brutal crackdown on antigovernment protests hit northern Syria in June. Today more than 7,600 of them live in Turkish government-sponsored camps. As the government of President Bashar al-Assad steps up its violent crackdown in Syria despite international condemnation, the refugees here appear to be settling in for what may be a long stay.
NYT EDITORIAL: The Torture Candidates
As hard as it is to believe, the Republican candidates for president seem to have learned very little from the moral calamities of the administration of George W. Bush. Three of the contenders for the party’s nomination have now come out in favor of the torture known as waterboarding. Only two have said it is illegal, and the rest don’t seem to have the backbone to even voice an opinion on the subject.
At Saturday night’s debate in South Carolina, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann said they would approve waterboarding of prisoners to extract information. They denied, of course, that waterboarding is torture, even though it’s been classified as such since the Spanish Inquisition. “Very disappointed by statements at S.C. GOP debate supporting waterboarding,” Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, wrote on Twitter. “Waterboarding is torture.”