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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6.5-magnitude quake strikes off Solomon Islands

HONIARA: A 6.5-magnitude earthquake hit off the Solomon Islands on Sunday, the latest powerful aftershock following a 8.0-magnitude quake that sparked a tsunami four days ago, US seismologists said.The US Geological Survey said the quake struck at 8:02 am, 2102 GMT Saturday, 29 kilometres south-southwest of Lata, the main town on remote Ndende Island in the Santa Cruz Islands, which are...

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The Audiophiliac wants to see your audio system

This is my system from a few years ago. The speakers are Magnepan 3.6s.(Credit:Wes Bender)If you have a state-of-the-art high-end system, or a tricked out iPod speaker, we'd love to see it. Take an interesting picture of your headphones, Bluetooth speaker, turntable, home theater, or whatever you have. If you built your own speakers or amp, that's right up my alley!Send JPEGs (not huge files) to theaudiophiliac...

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Pictures From Historic Northeast Blizzard

Shoveling Out  Photograph by Robert F. Bukaty, AP  A northeast blizzard dumped up to three feet of snow overnight Friday and brought hurricane-force wind gusts to areas...

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After Blizzard, Northeast Begins to Dig Out

The Northeast began the arduous process of cleaning up after a fierce storm swept through the region leaving behind up to three feet of snow in some areas.By early this 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 storm...

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Data-wiping algorithm cleans your cellphone

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondentMailing your cellphone to a recycling company might make you a few pounds, but it can leave you at risk of identity theft. The deletion techniques recycling companies use are meant for hard discs, and so don't work on the solid-state flash memory used in mobile phones. That means personal data like banking info, texts, contacts and pictures can end up in...

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Football: Second-half rally sees PSG go six points clear

PARIS: Paris Saint-Germain shook off a lacklustre first half to defeat Bastia 3-1 on Friday and go six points clear at the top of Ligue 1 in a morale-boosting win ahead of their Champions League duty next week.PSG, who will tackle Valencia on Tuesday in the first leg of their last 16 tie in Europe, moved onto 51 points, taking their recent run to 12 matches without defeat in all competitions.Jeremy...

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Big iPad game 'Infinity Blade: Dungeons' delayed again

Epic demoing Infinity Blade: Dungeons at the third-generation iPad event last March.(Credit:Donald Bell/CNET)It's turning out to be a bumpier road than expected for high-profile iPad game Infinity Blade: Dungeons.The game, which was previewed on-stage by Epic Games as part of Apple's debut of the third-generation iPad last year, now faces further delay following the closure of Impossible Studios,...

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From Our Vault: Busy Postman on Break, 1951

The United States Post Office announced this week that it intends to stop Saturday letter delivery beginning in August, 32 years after Congress mandated a sixth day of mail service.First class mail volume has been dropping by about five billion pieces annually since 2007. And the USPS operated almost $16 billion dollars in the red in 2012.In the 1950s, when this photo was taken, the federal...

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Blizzard of 2013 May Bring More Than 2 Feet of Snow

A blizzard of possibly historic proportions is set to strike the Northeast, starting today and could bring more than two 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...

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Robot inquisition keeps witnesses on the right track

MEMORY is a strange thing. Just using the verb "smash" in a question about a car crash instead of "bump" or "hit" causes witnesses to remember higher speeds and more serious damage. Known as the misinformation effect, it is a serious problem for police trying to gather accurate accounts of a potential crime. There's a way...

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Tennis: Injured Li Na out of Qatar Open

DOHA: China's Li Na has pulled out of next week's $2.3 million Qatar Open after failing to recover from the ankle injury she suffered in her Australian Open final defeat to Victoria Azarenka."Li Na has withdrawn from QatarTennis due to her ankle injury from the Australian Open final. #WTA #tennis," the WTA said on its Twitter account.The Qatar Open starts on Monday.- AFP/de !-- Zone...

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Guess what? Vine videos are longer than six seconds

It turns out that Vines are actually 6.5 seconds long, not six.(Credit:James Martin/CNET)Among the many curiosities about Twitter's Vine app has been how the company decided six seconds was the magic number for a clip's length.Well, guess what? It turns out that the maximum length of a Vine isn't six seconds at all. In fact, they top out at 6.5 seconds.And how do we know? After watching a Vine today...

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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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Alleged Cop-Killer Has Calif. Region on Edge

Police officers across Southern California are on the defensive and scaling back their public exposure today, no longer responding to "barking-dog calls" and donning tactical gear outside police stations as former-cop-turned-alleged-gunman Christopher Dorner, armed and apparently on the hunt for cops, remains at large.Dorner is suspected of killing one cop and two civilians...

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Today on New Scientist: 6 February 2013

Open Richard III DNA evidence for peer review A good case has been made that a skeleton unearthed from a car park is that of the last Plantagenet king of England - it's time to share the dataUniversal bug sensor takes guesswork out of diagnosis A machine that can identify all bacteria, viruses and fungi known to cause disease in humans should speed up diagnosis and help to reduce antibiotic...

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Euro slips ahead of ECB meeting

NEW YORK: The euro slipped against the US dollar on Wednesday ahead of the European Central Bank's policy meeting, expected to keep monetary policy on hold.Meanwhile, the Japanese currency pulled higher after hitting three-year lows on Tuesday.The euro fell to $1.3519 at 2200 GMT, from $1.3582 late Tuesday, nearly two cents below its 14-month high of $1.3710 hit on Friday.The slip came...

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Microsoft hits Reddit to address Surface Pro concerns

Microsoft's Surface Pro has come under a lot of scrutiny in reviews over the last 24 hours. Microsoft tried to address some of the issues that have been brought up.(Credit:Brooke Crothers)Microsoft addressed Surface Pro issues with disk space and battery life, among other topics, in a Reddit AMA today. The discussion was led by Panos Panay, head of the Surface team at Microsoft. He provided relatively...

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Confirmed: Couch Potatoes Have Lower Sperm Counts

Men, here's another reason to work up a sweat: It boosts your sperm count. According to new research, couch potatoes who watch lots of TV have fewer sperm than men who exercise moderately or vigorously each week.Sperm count is a measure of semen quality, which has mysteriously declined in U.S. men in recent decades. Low sperm count is linked to infertility as well as testicular cancer,...

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Galaxy May Be Full of 'Second Earths'

You may look out on a starry night and get a lonely feeling, but astronomers now say our Milky Way galaxy may be thick with planets much like Earth -- perhaps 4.5 billion of them, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.Astronomers looked at data from NASA's Kepler space telescope in orbit, and conclude that 6 percent of the red dwarf stars in the Milky...

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Today on New Scientist: 5 February 2013

Engineering light: Pull an image from nowhere A new generation of lenses could bring us better lighting, anti-forgery technology and novel movie projectors Baby boomers' health worse than their parents Americans who were born in the wake of the second world war have poorer health than the previous generation at the same ageNew 17-million-digit monster is largest known prime A distributed computing...

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Dell unveils private equity buyout worth US$24.4b

NEW YORK: Dell unveiled plans to go private Tuesday in a $24.4 billion deal giving founder Michael Dell a chance to reshape the former number one PC maker away from the spotlight of Wall Street."I believe this transaction will open an exciting new chapter for Dell, our customers and team members," Michael Dell said in unveiling the deal with equity investment firm Silver Lake, and backed...

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Where were you when the lights went out?

CBS News was inside the NFL operations booth when the lights went out.Where was I when the lights went out?I was at my post for the game in the CBS operations center inside the Superdome, sitting next to our head of NFL sales and our director of operations. As with every Super Bowl, we stayed in constant communication with the production truck to make sure all the commercials and promo spots played...

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