Sooty ships may be geoengineering by accident

GEOENGINEERING is being tested - albeit inadvertently - in the north Pacific. Soot from oil-burning ships is dumping about 1000 tonnes of soluble iron per year across 6 million square kilometres of ocean, new research has revealed. Fertilising the world's...

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Horsemeat 'contamination' could date back to August: Findus

LONDON: French frozen food supplier Comigel told the Findus brand that "the contamination" of processed beef products with horsemeat could date back to August 2012, Findus said in a statement Saturday."Findus want to be absolutely explicit that they were not aware of any issue of contamination with horsemeat last year," it said in a statement."They were only made aware of a possible August...

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Poll: Do you listen to movies or TV over headphones?

I suppose it's still a fair assumption that more people listen to music than movies with headphones, but there has to be a growing audience listening to movies, TV shows, and YouTube videos via their headphones. Thanks to the booming popularity of tablets, might the ratio of movies-to-music listening time be moving away from music? Or not?I watch a lot of movies at home with headphones on. They present...

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Space Pictures This Week: Sun Dragon, Celestial Seagull

Solar DragonImage courtesy SDO/NASAResembling a dragon's tail, remnants of a solar filament strain to escape the sun's gravity in an image released this week by NASA's Solar Dynamics...

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Storm Drops More Than 2 Feet of Snow on Northeast

A fierce winter storm brought blizzard conditions and hurricane force winds as the anticipated snowstorm descended across much of the Northeast overnight.By early Saturday morning, 650,000 homes and businesses were without power and at least five deaths were being blamed on the storm, three in Canada, one in New York and one in Connecticut, The Associated Press reported.The...

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Sleep and dreaming: Why can't we stay awake 24/7?

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Probe launched over email hacking of Bush family

WASHINGTON: A criminal inquiry was launched Friday into how a hacker appeared to breach email accounts belonging to former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, as well as other members of their family."There's a criminal investigation under way," Jim McGrath, a spokesman for the elder ex-president Bush, who is now aged 88 and was recently hospitalized, told AFP, following reports...

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SkyDrive users can now share Office documents with anyone

People who need to access your shared MS Office documents via a SkyDrive link should now find the process a bit easier.Using Microsoft's Office Web Apps or Office 2013, you can create a URL of any document that you store online. You can then e-mail that URL to anyone who needs to view or edit your file. Previously, that process required your collaborators to sign in with a Microsoft account before...

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Mexico's Robust Wind Energy Prospects Ruffle Nearby Villages

Photograph by Mark Stevenson, APWind turbines tower over indigenous villagers who turned out to see then-Mexican President Felipe Calderón inaugurate a $550 million wind project in the state of Oaxaca in 2009.It was the start of new cleaner energy drive for an oil-reliant nation, but one that has upended lives in the region's native farming and fishing villages. The battle between new energy and traditional...

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Monster Blizzard Takes Aim at Northeast

A blizzard of possibly historic proportions is set to strike the Northeast, starting today and bringing up to 2 feet of snow and strong winds that could shut down densely populated cities such as Boston and New York City.A storm from the west will join forces with one from the south to form a nor'easter that will sit and spin just off the East Coast, affecting more than 43 million...

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New map pinpoints cities to avoid as sea levels rise

See our interactive map of regional sea-level rises SYDNEY, Tokyo and Buenos Aires watch out. These cities will experience some of the greatest sea level rises by 2100, according to one of the most comprehensive predictions to date....

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'Light' sodas may hike diabetes risk: study

PARIS: Artificially sweetened sodas have been linked to a higher risk of Type 2 diabetes for women than sodas sweetened with ordinary sugar, a French study unveiled on Thursday found."Contrary to conventional thinking, the risk of diabetes is higher with 'light' beverages compared with 'regular' sweetened drinks," the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) said.The...

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Ouya chief: We'll launch a new console every year

Ouya's console will be updated each year with new and better components, the company's founder and CEO said earlier today on the sidelines of the DICE Summit.Speaking to The Verge in an interview published today, Ouya chief Julie Uhrman said that starting next year and every year thereafter, the company will bundle the most powerful mobile processors available in its console."Our plan is to have a...

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Severed Heads Were Sacrifices in Ancient Mexico

Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of more than 150 skulls from an ancient shrine in central Mexico—evidence of one of the largest mass sacrifices of humans in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.The skulls, many facing east, lay beneath a crude, slightly elevated mound of crushed stone on what was once an artificial island in a vast shallow lake, now completely dry."The site is barely a bump...

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Ex-LA Cop Sought in Shootings of 3 Cops, 2 Slayings

Police in Southern California say they suspect that a fired cop is connected to the shootings -- one fatal -- of three police officers this morning, as well as the weekend slayings of an assistant women's college basketball coach and her fiancé in what cops believe are acts of revenge against the LAPD, as suggested in the suspect's online manifesto.Former police officer Christopher...

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Sleep and dreaming: Slumber at the flick of a switch

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Royal Bank of Scotland fined US$612m to settle Libor probe

LONDON : State-rescued Royal Bank of Scotland will pay fines totalling US$612 million (453 million euros) to US and British regulators to settle allegations of Libor interest rate rigging, it announced on Wednesday.RBS is the third bank to admit its part in the Libor affair after British rival Barclays and Swiss lender UBS.The investigations uncovered "wrongdoing" by 21 employees, predominantly...

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Ultraslim notebook shipments poised for growth in 2013

A look at ultraslim PC shipments between 2012 and 2017.(Credit:NPD Display Search)Ultraslim notebooks -- defined as x86-based PCs with screen sizes between 10 and 17 inches and thicknesses of no greater than 21mm -- are seeing shipments squeezed by display technology, a new study from NPD DisplaySearch has revealed. But that won't be enough to keep them down."The high-end specifications for touch...

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The Real Richard III

It's a question that actors from Laurence Olivier to Kevin Spacey have grappled with: What did Richard III, the villainous protagonist of Shakespeare's famous historical drama, really look and sound like?In the wake of this week's announcement by the University of Leicester that archaeologists have discovered the 15th-century British king's lost skeleton beneath a parking lot, news continues...

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US Postal Service to End Saturday Mail Delivery

Feb 6, 2013 8:28am                                               (Image Credit: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)Weekend mail delivery...

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New 17-million-digit monster is largest known prime

The largest known prime number has just shot up to 257,885,161 - 1, breaking a four-year dry spell in the search for new, ever-larger primes. Curtis Cooper at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg made the find as part of the Great Internet...

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Afghanistan's Karzai confirms to leave power in 2014

OSLO: Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai confirmed Tuesday in Oslo that he plans to step down next year when his mandate expires."The question of me staying as the president beyond 2014 is out of the question," Karzai said when reporters asked about recent speculation that he was keen to stay on."Neither am I seeking a third term, nor does the constitution allow it. There will be an election...

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Hidden 'radio' buttons discovered in Apple's iOS 6.1

There's a hint that Apple has something new in the pipeline, and the company appears to have tucked it away inside the latest version of its iOS software.Discovered last night within a freshly-jailbroken iPad, are a set of buttons and code references for "radio," a feature found in iTunes on Macs and PCs, but not on the iPad or iPhone. Making things more interesting is another button suggesting you...

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Space Pictures This Week: A Space Monkey, Printing a Moon Base

Illustration courtesy Foster and Partners/ESAThe European Space Agency (ESA) announced January 31 that it is looking into building a moon base (pictured in an artist's conception) using a technique called 3-D printing.It probably won't be as easy as whipping out a printer, hooking it to a computer, and pressing "print," but using lunar soils as the basis for actual building blocks could be a possibility."Terrestrial...

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Boy Rescued in Ala. Standoff 'Laughing, Joking'

The 5-year-old boy held hostage in a nearly week-long standoff in Alabama is in good spirits and apparently unharmed after being reunited with his family at a hospital, according to his family and law enforcement officials.The boy, identified only as Ethan, was rescued by the FBI Monday afternoon after they rushed the underground bunker where suspect Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, was...

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