As we near the end of 2013, if a mutual fund manager does not have successful Company X - be it Netflix or anything else that has done well this year - the owners of the mutual fund shares are going to have a lot of questions.

As a result of that competitive pressure, the mutual fund manager may buy Company X - at its all-time high, after others are quite profitable in it - just to show it in the portfolio.

Typhoon Francisco was already spreading fringe clouds over southern Japan when NASA's Aqua satellite flew overhead and captured a picture of the storm from space on Oct. 22nd at 04:30 UTC/12:30 a.m. EDT.

Aqua captured Typhoon Francisco approaching Japan with a tightly wound center and small eye. Bands of thunderstorms wrapped into the center from the northern and southern quadrants of the storm as Francisco moved toward Japan. The image was created by the NASA MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Habitat for Humanity International is getting 100,000 PackH₂O collapsible water backpacks from the manufacturer, Greif, to use in 8 developing countries.

In my previous article, I posted the press release for the Science Play and Research kit. There are 76 days left in the competition. I can only produce one article per week due to my work schedule thus I’d only be able to come up with a chemistry set with 11 experiments. It wouldn't be much of a chemistry set would it? So, I’ve decided not to actually enter the competition but instead to post ideas for the set so whoever wants to use them can incorporate them into their design for SPARK. 

According to the FAQ page:

Does the entry need to be based on the science of chemistry?

Any time you get a majority of people together, there will always be some sensitivity and compassion and outreach for the minority. In science academia, it is obvious; small blips in representation get concern about fixing the problem of how to get more of demographic X.

A high school student is credited with finding the youngest, smallest and most complete fossil skeleton yet known from the iconic tube-crested dinosaur Parasaurolophus, in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. 

The discovery shows that the prehistoric plant-eater sprouted its strange headgear before it celebrated its first birthday. Three-dimensional scans of nearly the entire fossil make this the most digitally accessible dinosaur to date.

Female edible dormice (Glis glis) have a pleasant taste and have long been viewed as a special delicacy. The Romans even kept them in captivity to fatten them up for eating, which explains the "edible" part of their name. 

The reason is because after summer ends, and they are done caring for their young, they start to replenish their fat stores to cope with the upcoming winter. Later in the year, when outside temperatures drop, dormice move to their hibernation quarters where they will spend months without food. During hibernation, dormice enter phases of 'torpor': they drastically reduce their metabolic rate and lower their body temperature to that of the surrounding environment.

During a space shuttle mission on October 30th, 2007, astronauts set out to install two solar panels on the truss of the International Space Station (ISS). The first panel deployed successfully but they noticed a two-foot-wide tear in the second panel. 

To repair it, they had to send someone on a spacewalk while tethered to the shuttle’s inspection arm. Mercury astronauts wouldn't have blinked at the idea but modern NASA has a zero risk tolerance so not only was it dangerous - the robotic arm hadn't been used in such a way, a wrong move could have electrocuted the astronaut - but it also had political implications if an accident happened. 

I am not a metaphysician (or a metaphysicist, as some call themselves), but I've been fascinated for a while by what I've come to think of as the metaphysics wars. Let me explain. Metaphysics is, of course, one of the classic branches of philosophy, tracing back at least to the pre-Socratic Thales of Miletus (the guy who thought that all is made of water), and of course getting its name from Aristotle's treatise (though that wasn't the original title, it was named so afterwards, because it came after Aristotle's Physics).

If you want your daughter to do better in science, get her exercising, says a paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. All teens benefit, girls more. The improvements were sustained over the long term, with the findings pointing to a dose-response effect—the more intensive exercise was taken, the greater the impact on test results.

They base their findings on a representative sample of almost 5,000 children who were all part of the Children of the 90s study, also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). This is tracking the long term health of around 14,000 children born in the U.K. between 1991 and 1992 in the South West of England.