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President Obama has responded forcefully to the Newtown, Conn., shootings this past week. He assigned Vice President Biden to come up with policies aimed at preventing future such tragedies. The president has also been trying to strike a budget deal to avoid the year-end "fiscal cliff."

That talk about the Mayan calendar supposedly predicting the end of the world turned out to be just ... talk. Now, on to the next predictions about the end of the world. Watch out for 2016 and 2020.

Look at Patrick Kruger's house and you see the bottom of his tree through a window, and the top pushing through a damaged roof. Kruger was actually having a little fun. He broke his 14-foot tree in two and used building materials to create the illusion.

National Rifle Association officials say armed officers need to be put in every school. They were reacting to last Friday's mass shooting in Newtown, Conn.

President Obama is expected Friday to nominate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., as his next secretary of state. Kerry would replace Hillary Clinton, who's planning to leave the post after four years as the president's globetrotting emissary.

Jazz lost many great saxophonists in 2012, including David S. Ware, John Tchicai, Byard Lancaster, Faruq Z. Bey, Hal McKusick and Red Holloway. Critic Kevin Whitehead pays tribute to three more of his favorites.

The SciFri Book Club is touring the solar system, with Dava Sobel's 2005 The Planets. Call in with a review of the book. Plus Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA, joins the club to give an update on what's happened planet-wise since the book was published.

The ancient Maya had many scientific accomplishments: they tracked the Moon and the planets, knew a solar year was 365 days, and even invented the concept of zero. As for the 2012 apocalypse? It's simply a misinterpretation of the Maya calendar, say archaeologists Marcello Canuto and William Saturno.

The hagfish or "slime eel" shoots out slime containing silk-like fibers of remarkable strength. Douglas Fudge, a biologist at the University of Guelph, says it could be a good substitute for today's synthetic fibers--it's 10 times stronger than nylon, for example--and bacteria can be trained to make it.

Photographer Colin Legg makes time-lapse movies of celestial scenes, from auroras to eclipses. Photographing mostly in remote parts of Australia, where human-made light doesn't compete with starlight, Legg describes some of the challenges of this type of photography: from babysitting cameras for days and nights on end to running electronics in the backcountry.

President Obama and others remember the Senate's most senior member for his long public service and dedication during a funeral service Friday in Washington, D.C.

John Boehner's inability to get fellow Republicans to line up behind him not only increases doubts about his future as House speaker; it also raises a more immediate question for President Obama: Who can he negotiate with in the effort to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff?

The Massachusetts senator has already carried out sensitive diplomatic efforts on behalf of President Obama, with a strong focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years.

Kristian Aspelin had one thing in his favor: enough money to pay for medical experts. The experts were able to convince prosecutors that his infant son's death was an accident.

Japan's economy was a world beater in the 1980s. But the country has now gone through two tough decades and there's no end in sight. What lessons might it hold for the U.S. as it confronts the "fiscal cliff"?

After a 1996 mass shooting, the country changed its gun laws and the government bought back roughly 20 percent of all guns. Since then, gun violence has been down, and there have not been any mass killings.

There is a strong consensus in favor of colon cancer screening. Educational efforts have fallen short when it comes to meeting public health goals. Why don't more people get tested?

Many Staten Island residents are still not back in their homes since Sandy washed ashore. Local volunteers have opened a toy store where FEMA-registered families with children can pick up donated toys, holiday decorations and stocking stuffers. Thus far, the shop has given away more than 2,000 toys.

In a news conference Friday, the president said both parties would have to work together in the next 10 days to prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans.

Eastern Oregon is known more for ranching than abstract sculpture, but some residents are venturing into the world of fine art. For the last five years, Whit Deschner has been organizing the Great Salt Lick Contest, which gathers salt blocks artfully licked by local farm animals.