The Megaupload case shows how natural experiments can arise, and how they are limited.

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This tallies with the outcome of natural experiments in recent history, such as the influx of 610, 000 Russian Jews into Israel in the early 1990s, the return of 900, 000 Frenchmen from Algeria in 1962 or the homecoming of 600, 000 Portuguese after the collapse of their empire in Africa in 1974-76.

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Now to help facilitate the growth of robot scientists for routine, automated experiment, King and his team are urging that the methods and processes of science be formalized, to remove the ambiguities of natural language and make it easier to reproduce experiments and build the bases of knowledge.

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Thomas Cook, a pioneer of controlled experiments in education at Northwestern University, in Chicago, suggests that much of the opposition to experimental evaluation stems from a common philosophical malaise among social scientists, who doubt the validity of the natural sciences, and therefore reject the potential of knowledge derived from controlled experiments.

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Thanks to its commitment to renewable energy, Hawaii is now also becoming something of a test bed for renewable energy technologies, from the study of various geothermal and algae-based biofuel technologies happening at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority on the Big Island to smart grid experiments the state is conducting along with representatives from Japan and China.

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He pointed out that Professor Henshaw's experiments were carried out in the open air, and that houses provided natural "shielding" from the electromagnetic fields.

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Studies of norovirus epidemics and human volunteer experiments (yes, there really are people willing to do this) showed that some individuals had natural resistance and this appeared to run in families - it was inherited.

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