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: Beckham's US adventure ends with victory

LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles Galaxy rallied with three goals in the second half on Saturday to capture a second straight MLS Cup crown with a 3-1 win over Houston in David Beckham's farewell match in North America.Robbie Keane, Omar Gonzalez and Landon Donovan scored goals for the heavily-favoured Galaxy who clinched their fourth MLS Cup title by beating the Dynamo for the second consecutive...

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McAfee nabbed? His blog says maybe, following CNN interview

The bizarre real-life potboiler concerning on-the-lam antivirus-software pioneer John McAfee continued today, as -- following a cloak-and-dagger CNN interview with the fugitive -- McAfee's own blog posted an item saying he may have been captured at the Belize-Mexico border.The item, pictured above and reported earlier by news agency AFP, says little more than that and calls the report of the capture...

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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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Police: KC Chiefs Player Killed Girlfriend, Self

Jovan Belcher, a linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs, committed suicide today in front of his coaches and police officers outside the team's stadium, shortly after he fatally shot his girlfriend, police said."We heard that they had been arguing in the past [and] as far as recently, they'd been arguing before the shooting occurred this morning," Kansas City Police spokesman...

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Today on New Scientist: 30 November 2012

Dinosaurs might have once gazed into the Grand Canyon It had been thought that the canyon formed 6 million years ago, but now two geologists say it is actually closer to 70 million years oldSaturn's rings may double up as a moon factory A new model suggests Saturn's famous rings spawned the planet's moons. Could the mechanism explain the moons of Uranus, Neptune and even Earth?Gaming the future:...

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Palestinians need separate vote to join IMF: spokeswoman

WASHINGTON: The International Monetary Fund said on Friday that the UN vote to recognize Palestine as a non-member observer state does not mean the Palestinians will automatically become members of the financial institution.In response to an AFP query, spokeswoman Wafa Amr said United Nations recognition "by itself has no direct effect on a possible application for membership of the IMF.""The...

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Apple re-posts 10.8.2 update for Mac Mini and MacBook users

Apple has re-issued its 10.8.2 update for specificMac systems after having pulled it over a week ago.OS X 10.8.2 has been available for Mac systems since mid-September, but in mid-November Apple pulled a specific version of the updater for the 2012Mac Mini,iMac, and 13-inch MacBook Pro models, resulting in the inability for those with these systems to be updated to the latest version of OS X. 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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3 Dead After Attack at Wyo. Community College

Three people are dead after an attack at Casper College, a Wyoming community college, that may have involved a type of bow and arrow.The college was shut down Friday morning after the attack."Emergency Alert: All classes and activities are cancelled today," read a message posted on the school's website.Initial calls came in just after 9 a.m. reporting a "traumatic injury" on...

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Projections of sea level rise are vast underestimates

Expect more water to lap at your shores. That's the take-home message from two studies out this week that look at the latest data on sea level rise due to climate change. The first shows that current projections for the end of the...

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US, Israel isolated in downplaying Palestine vote

WASHINGTON: The United States and Israel downplayed on Thursday the Palestinians' new upgraded status at the UN, saying it changed nothing in actual practice and even made peace with the Jewish state a remoter prospect.Palestinians rejoiced at the historic albeit largely symbolic vote at the UN General Assembly in New York, firing guns into the air in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank,...

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Anonymous declares war on Syrian government Web sites

Determining that the Syrian government was responsible for the country's Internet blackout, the online hacktivist group Anonymous has announced a campaign against Syrian government Web sites hosted outside the country.The Middle Eastern country began experiencing an Internet outage this morning, and many people on Twitter reported that phone lines are down as well. All 84 of Syria's IP address blocks...

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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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Palestinians Win Statehood Status at U.N.

The U.N. General Assembly voted today to approve Palestinians' request to be upgraded to a "non-member observer state," defying opposition by the U.S. and Israel.Before the vote, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the General Assembly that it "is being asked today to issue the birth certificate of Palestine."Of the 193 countries in the General Assembly 138 voted to recognize...

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Today on New Scientist: 28 November 2012

Out-of-proportion black hole is a rare cosmic fossil A fairly small galaxy is host to a strangely enormous black hole, which could be a remnant of a quasar from the dawn of timeFlowing lithium atoms form accidental transistor A transistor that controls the flow of atoms, rather than electrons, could be used as a model to probe the mysterious electrical property of superconductivityEurope in...

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Manning's suicide watch at US brig "senseless": doctor

FORT MEADE, Maryland: A US military psychiatrist testified on Wednesday that the harsh detention of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning was "senseless" and that commanders totally ignored his advice to lift tough suicide watch measures.Captain William Hoctor, a Navy doctor who evaluated Manning about every week during his confinement at a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, told the...

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Weatherman's fiancee stages naked coup of his Twitter feed

Storm clouds ahead?(Credit:Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)There are some people to whom things just happen.It may well be that John Bolaris is one of those people. Last year, he was suspended from his job at WTXF-TV in Philadelphia (he was subsequently fired) after Playboy wrote that he had been the alleged victim of "bottle girls" in a Miami club.These women, it seems, had the bottle to wring...

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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. Sounds like something out of science fiction, right? But for ailing Chinese consumers and nomadic Tibetan harvesters, the parasite...

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Factory Workers: We Were Locked in, Flames Spread

More survivors of the factory fire in Bangladesh that killed more than 100 garment workers this weekend have told human rights and international labor groups they were actually locked in by security gates as the flames spread."The police and the fire department are confirming that the collapsible gates were locked on each floor," said Charles Kernighan, executive director of...

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Gas explosion in Springfield points to ageing pipes

Human error and corroded pipes were a catastrophic combination on 23 November when a natural gas explosion in Springfield, Massachusetts, injured 21 people and damaged more than 40 buildings. Gas company officials attributed the...

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US again says China not currency manipulator

WASHINGTON: The US Treasury on Tuesday again stopped short of labeling China a currency manipulator, noting gains in the value of the yuan, but said the currency remains "significantly undervalued."In a twice-yearly finding to answer congressional critics of China's overwhelming bilateral trade advantage, the Treasury declined to slap Beijing with the currency manipulator tag, a move that...

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Quick workaround for MacBook black screen

A while ago a number of MacBook users noticed a pretty annoying black-screen bug on their systems, in which the computer would appear to be running but would not show any output on the display. To get around this issue, people were forced to restart their systems, losing any unsaved data.Investigations of this bug showed the problem appeared to be rooted in the handling of the dual graphics cards...

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