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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Tennis: Czechs lead Australia 2-0 in Fed Cup

PRAGUE: Petra Kvitova and Lucie Safarova handed holders Czech Republic a 2-0 lead over Australia after the first day of their Fed Cup World Group tie in the eastern Czech city of Ostrava on Saturday.In the first rubber, Kvitova, the Czech number one and world number eight, beat Australia's 168-ranked Jarmila Gajdosova 7-6 (7/2), 6-3 in an hour and 35 minutes.Safarova, the world number...

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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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Webcam and CCTV security flaw shows us to prying eyes

A networking loophole has made it easy to have a peek at what everyone else is doing by accessing cameras connected to the internet UNIVERSAL Plug and Play was never meant to be quite so universal. UPnP software was designed to let cameras, printers, digital video recorders and games consoles automatically...

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Football: Kelly signs new Liverpool contract

LONDON: Liverpool defender Martin Kelly signed a new long-term contract with the Premier League club on Friday.Kelly, 22, is currently sidelined due to a knee ligament injury, but the England international has been rewarded for his impressive displays at full-back earlier this season.The day after team-mate Jamie Carragher announced he will retire at the end of the season, Liverpool manager...

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Apple reportedly hires LG's former OLED TV expert

Apple has reportedly hired a display expert with ties to LG and Samsung, and whose most recent work included efforts on OLED technology for TV sets. According to a report from the OLED Association, Apple has wooed James (Jueng-Gil) Lee, a display and semiconductor technology expert who's had stints at LG Display, Samsung, and now-defunct flat panel design company Candescent Technologies. The hire,...

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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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Rescued Ethan Spends Birthday With SWAT Heroes

As a beaming 6-year-old Ethan said "cheese" for photos and played with toy cars at his birthday party, there were no immediate signs of the turmoil the young boy had endured just days earlier.The boy, identified only as Ethan, was held hostage in a nearly week-long standoff in Alabama. He was physically unharmed after Jimmy Lee Dykes kidnapped him from a school bus and held...

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Today on New Scientist: 7 February 2013

Light-taming window conjures Turing's image Watch how a surface can be manipulated to cast images, allowing designers to paint with lightNew map pinpoints cities to avoid as sea levels rise Sydney, Tokyo and Buenos Aires are in for some of the biggest sea-level rises by 2100, finds one of the most comprehensive predictions to dateTour of the body hardly gets under the skin Anatomies by Hugh...

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War crimes court wants Gaddafi spy chief handed over

THE HAGUE: International Criminal Court judges on Thursday demanded Libya hand over Muammar Gaddafi's former spy chief Abdullah Senussi to face charges of crimes against humanity.The latest broadside in the legal tug-of-war between The Hague-based ICC and Tripoli over where Senussi and Gaddafi's son Seif al-Islam should be tried repeated a demand for Senussi to be handed over.The ICC "orders...

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Einhorn's hedge fund to Apple: Show me the money

"Show me the money" might have been the most famous line from the old Tom Cruise movie "Jerry Maguire," but that's exactly what a big Apple shareholder wants. Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund run by David Einhorn, today filed a lawsuit and issued a letter to Apple shareholders, urging them to support his push to get Apple to share more of its cash with investors. "Apple is a phenomenal company...

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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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Choking China: The struggle to clear Beijing's air

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Boeing 787 probe results weeks away, says NTSB chief

WASHINGTON: The results of the National Transportation Safety Board's investigation into the causes of a battery fire on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner are expected in the coming weeks, NTSB chair Deborah Hersman said on Wednesday."We're probably weeks away from being able to tell people what happened and what needs to be changed," Hersman said at a news conference.The NTSB chief said investigators...

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ITC decision on Apple v. Samsung spat to come in August

The International Trade Commission's final ruling on a spat between Apple and Samsung is due this August, following a review of an earlier decision. The judge presiding over the patent case (which was filed by Apple against Samsung in July 2011) last night said he plans to to issue final decision in the case on August 1, following an updated initial determination that's subject to a review. Last October,...

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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 Weekend mail delivery is about to come to an end.The U.S. Postal Service will stop delivering mail on Saturdays, but will continue to deliver packages six days a week, the USPS announced at a news conference this morning.While post offices that open on Saturdays will continue to do so, the initiative, which is expected to begin the week of August...

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Engineering light: Pull an image from nowhere

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BP profits slide on US oil spill fallout

LONDON: British energy giant BP on Tuesday said its net profits slumped by more than half last year on fines and asset sales linked to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, ahead of a US trial later this month.Earnings after tax tumbled 54 percent to $11.58 billion (8.6 billion euros) in 2012, compared with $25.7 billion in 2011, BP said in a results statement.Adjusted net profit,...

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5 consequences of Dell's $24.4 billion deal to go private

Will Dell PCs make a comeback?(Credit:Dell)Dell's $24.4 billion deal to go private is a sign of the times. The PC market is collapsing, Microsoft is trying to save it, and the IPO isn't what it used to be.The company is about to get a major transformation. Once the deal is completed (with a $2 billion loan from Microsoft as part of the financing), it will be owned by Silver Lake Partners and Dell...

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