Weaver ants help flowers get the best pollinator

MOST flowers don't want pesky ants hanging around scaring away would-be pollinators. Not so the Singapore rhododendron - the first flower found to recruit ants to chase poor pollinators away. Francisco Gonzálvez at EEZA, the arid...

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Football: Michu brace drops Arsenal down to 10th

LONDON: Swansea piled on the misery for Arsenal as Michu scored twice in the closing minutes to clinch a shock 2-0 win at the Emirates Stadium on Saturday.Spanish forward Michu underlined his growing reputation as the bargain buy of the season with a pair of clinical finishes on the counter attack, prompting Arsenal's fans to unleash a torrent of abuse at manager Arsene Wenger and his...

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HTC's budget-friendly Windows Phone 8S not coming to U.S.

A pack of Windows Phone 8S devices in different colors.(Credit:Brian Bennett/CNET)HTC won't be making its budget-minded Windows Phone handset, the 8S, available in the United States.In a statement to Engadget yesterday, the company called its higher-end device, the 8X, its "signature Windows Phone" and said that with its focus on that handset, the 8S "is not currently planned for distribution in the...

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Photos: Kilauea Lava Reaches the Sea

Into the Sea Photograph by Hugh Gentry, ReutersA spectacular natural phenomenon was on display early this week as lava from a vent in Hawaii's Kilauea volcano flowed into...

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KC Chiefs Player Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide

A Kansas City Chiefs football player committed suicide today in front of his coaches and police outside of the team's stadium, just as officers investigating the shooting of the player's girlfriend arrived on the scene, police said.The name of the 25-year-old player has not yet been released.Kansas City Police were first alerted something was wrong by the girlfriend's mother."The...

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Dinosaurs might have once gazed into the Grand Canyon

Joanna Carver, reporter(Image: John Burcham/NGS)Picture the scene. It's late in the Cretaceous period, 70 million years ago. A group of dinosaurs have gathered at the rim of what will become known as the Grand Canyon. They're gawping over the edge, just as humans will in millennia to come.That might not be complete fantasy. It had been thought that the canyon formed 6 million years ago. But now...

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Strauss-Kahn, maid don't have deal yet: lawyers

NEW YORK: Lawyers for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former IMF chief, shot down reports Friday that he was ready to pay $6 million to a Manhattan maid accusing him of sexual assault -- but confirmed that he was negotiating.In a statement seeking to dampen media speculation over an out-of-court settlement of the maid's civil suit, the lawyers stressed that Strauss-Kahn was talking,...

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Cyber Monday rings up record U.S. sales (week in review)

This year's Cyber Monday was one for the record books. Market analyst ComScore reported that spending in the U.S. on Monday reached $1.465 billion, up 17 percent from a year ago, "representing the heaviest [U.S.] online spending day in history and the second day this season (in addition toBlack Friday) to surpass $1 billion in sales."ComScore said that the top category for sales was digital content...

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Pictures: Inside the World's Most Powerful Laser

Photograph courtesy Damien Jemison, LLNLLooking like a portal to a science fiction movie, preamplifiers line a corridor at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF).Preamplifiers work by increasing the energy of laser beams—up to ten billion times—before these beams reach the facility's target chamber.The project's lasers are tackling "one of physics' grand...

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Mo. Couple Wins Half of Powerball Jackpot

The lucky winners of half of the record $587.5 million Powerball jackpot have been identified as Mark and Cindy Hill of Dearborn, Mo., their working-class lives suddenly taking a turn to the financial stratosphere.Cindy Hill, who with her husband has three adult sons and a 6-year-old daughter adopted from China, purchased the ticket at a Trex Mart gas station in Dearborn."I...

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Leaping shark scores big air, but no dinner

Flora Graham, deputy editor, newscientist.com(Image: Dana Allen/Caters news)Despite its spectacular leap, this great white shark is going home with an empty stomach. The seal that it has crushed in its jaws is a rubber decoy, created by the photographer, Dana Allen, to tempt it out of the sea. The shark was pictured in False Bay, off Cape Town in South Africa. It's common for great whites to leap...

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Long hard road for Spain in recession: OECD

MADRID: Spain is engulfed in a long recession with little hope of a quick recovery and its towering unemployment rate will soar further, the OECD club of industrialised nations said Thursday.Spain must quickly fix its banks to avert the "substantial risk" of being cut off from external financing and plunging into an even deeper recession, the body warned in a report."The economy is undergoing...

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Military judge accepts plea terms in Bradley Manning case

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of sharing documents with WikiLeaks that were eventually released on the Internet, is now one step closer to handling some of the claims brought against him.Military judge Colonel Denise Lind today accepted the language used to describe seven charges to which Manning could plead guilty. The charges include Manning willfully sending videos, war logs, and...

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Caterpillar Fungus Has Anti-Inflammatory Properties

In the Tibetan mountains, a fungus attaches itself to a moth larva burrowed in the soil. It infects and slowly consumes its host from within, taking over its brain and making the young caterpillar move to a position from which the fungus can grow and spore again. (Learn about other fungi that invade brains.)Sounds like something out of science fiction, right? But for ailing Chinese consumers...

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Petraeus Tells Friend He 'Screwed Up Royally'

One of David Petraeus' closest friends says the former CIA director admitted that he "screwed up royally" by having an affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell.Retired Brigadier Gen. James Shelton has been friends with Petraeus for more than three decades and reached to out to him after he resigned from the CIA. Shelton told ABC News that the former four-star general wrote...

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Europe in 2050: a survivor's guide to climate change

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Italy, China sign deals worth US$1.27b

ROME: Italian and Chinese firms signed deals worth $1.27 billion (984 million euros) on Wednesday in Rome at talks attended by Prime Minister Mario Monti and senior Chinese politburo member Jia Qinglin.The six deals included agreements between Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and Italian Internet provider Fastweb for $557 million and between China Everbright and Chinese-owned Italy-based...

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$2.4 million air-conditioned limo submarine perfect for 007

The red paint job makes it faster, right?(Credit:U-Boat Worx)When I get into a submarine, I expect certain amenities like air conditioning, aniPod sound system, a screaming red paint job, and a plate of caviar. All except the caviar are available with the C-Explorer 5 from U-Boat Worx.The $2.4 million C-Explorer 5 is being advertised as the "world's first subsea limousine." It holds five people, has...

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Black Hole Blast Biggest Ever Recorded

Astronomers have witnessed a record-breaking blast of gas and dust flowing out of a monster black hole more than 11.5 billion light years away.The supermassive gravity well, with a mass of one to three billion suns, lurks at the core of a quasar—a class of extremely bright and energetic galaxies—dubbed SDSS J1106 1939. (See "Black Hole Blasts Superheated Early Universe.")"We discovered...

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Susan Rice Made Allies, Enemies Before Benghazi

United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, on Capitol Hill this week answering questions about her role after the U.S. consulate attack in Benghazi, has become yet another player in the divide between the left and right, with her possible nomination as the next Secretary of State hanging in the balance.But who was Susan Rice before she told ABC's "This Week" and other Sunday morning...

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Banished diseases making a comeback in Europe

A perfect storm of warmer weather, tropical migrants and plummeting health budgets is stoking the resurgence of once-banished, mosquito-borne diseases in Europe. Several countries have been hit by Europe's financial crisis, and by diseases brought in by...

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Experts comb for clues in deadly German blaze

TITISEE-NEUSTADT, Germany: Experts sifted through a fire-ravaged workshop for the disabled in Germany on Tuesday, hunting for the cause of a fierce blaze there that killed 14 people.Most of the dead from the fire which began on Monday at the centre in the southwestern town of Titisee-Neustadt in Germany's Black Forest region were disabled, police said.A 50-year-old female carer was also...

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Google fighting German plan for linking fee

Google has kicked off a campaign against a proposed German law that would force search engine providers to pay copyright fees every time they return a news article in their results.The Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger, or "ancillary copyright for press publishers," would provide an extension of copyright in Germany to cover snippets of articles, such as those that show up in search results...

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Space Pictures This Week: Space "Horse," Mars Rover, More

High Horse Photograph by Greg Parker, Your Shot The Horsehead Nebula rears its pretty head in a November 17 photograph submitted to National Geographic's Your Shot photo community.Taken...

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GOP Senators More Troubled After Rice Meeting

Emerging from a closed-door meeting, three Republican senators said Tuesday they are more troubled than ever with comments made days after the deadly Sept. 11 raid in Libya by Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador and President Barack Obama's possible choice for secretary of state.Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte met privately with Rice and acting CIA Director Michael...

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Arafat's bones could reveal polonium poisoning

The body of Yasser Arafat is set to be exhumed tomorrow in an effort to determine whether his death in 2004 was caused by polonium-210 poisoning. Tests earlier this year found unusually high levels of the radioactive material on the former Palestinian leader's clothes and toothbrush, but it's still unclear whether Arafat was...

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