Zebrafish made to grow pre-hands instead of fins

PERHAPS the little fish embryo shown here is dancing a jig because it has just discovered that it has legs instead of fins. Fossils show that limbs evolved from fins, but a new study shows how it may have happened, live in the lab. ...

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Body found in Singapore River

SINGAPORE: A man was found dead in the Singapore River along Clarke Quay early Sunday morning. The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said it received a call at about 1.30am.Someone was spotted jumping into the river near Block A.SCDF officers arrived about four minutes later and conducted a search around the area.Diving at a depth of about 3 metres, rescuers retrieved the body of a...

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Google will alter search to end FTC antitrust inquiry, says report

The Federal Trade Commission may bring its two-year antitrust investigation of Google to a close by allowing the company to make voluntary changes to its search business, according to a report.The search giant is said to be readying an announcement about changes to its use of "snippets," bits of text culled from sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor and displayed in search results, Politico reports,...

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Space Pictures This Week: Frosty Mars, Mini Nile, More

Photograph by Mike Theiss, National GeographicThe aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, illuminates the Arctic sky in a recent picture by National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss.A storm chaser by trade, Theiss is in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to photograph auroras, which result from collisions between charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere and gaseous particles...

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Conn. Victim's Father Remembers 'Loving' Daughter

(Image credit: Emilie Parker Fund/Facebook)Emilie Parker, the little girl with the blond hair and bright blue eyes, would have been one of the first to comfort her classmates at Sandy Hook Elementary School, had a gunman’s bullets not claimed her life, her father said.“My daughter Emilie would be one of the first ones to be standing and giving support to all the victims because that’s the kind...

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CERN becomes first pure physics voice in UN chorus

Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporter(Image: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras)If CERN observes the proceedings of the United Nations, will it change the outcome?The international particle physics laboratory, based near Geneva, Switzerland, has been granted observer status in the General Assembly of the United Nations, CERN officials announced today. The lab joins environmental groups and public...

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Police hunt man who threatened shooting at US mosque

LOS ANGELES: Police in California are looking for a man who reportedly walked into a California mosque saying he had a gun and threatened to kill everyone, a spokeswoman said Friday.The man entered the Ibrahim Khalilullah Islamic Center in Fremont, south of San Francisco, during afternoon prayer Wednesday, said mosque leaders, urging official action to track down the man.According to witnesses,...

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Put your phone into 'car mode' with these dashboard apps

Sadly, Android's original Car Home app is incompatible with most modern versions of the OS. (Credit:Google)My firstAndroid phone, the original Motorola Droid, was one of the first phones to debut Google Maps Navigation. Now, Google knew that this feature would get drivers interested in using their Android phones in the car and that the tiny virtual buttons and shortcuts that worked well when the device...

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Space Pictures This Week: Frosty Mars, Mini Nile, More

Photograph by Mike Theiss, National GeographicThe aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, illuminates the Arctic sky in a recent picture by National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss.A storm chaser by trade, Theiss is in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to photograph auroras, which result from collisions between charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere and gaseous particles...

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Conn. Shooter Adam Lanza: 'Obviously Not Well'

Adam Lanza of Newtown, Connecticut was a child of the suburbs and a child of divorce who at age 20 still lived with his mother.This morning he appears to have started his day by shooting his mother Nancy in the face, and then driving to nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School armed with at least two handguns and at least one semi-automatic rifle.There, before turning his gun on himself,...

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Today on New Scientist: 13 December 2012

Violent beauty at the end of an Alaskan glacier You can almost hear the crash of ice on water in this stunning image of an ice sheet calving off the Chenega glacier in AlaskaOvereating now bigger global problem than lack of food The most comprehensive disease report ever produced confirms that, for the first time, there is a larger health problem from people eating too much than too littleIn...

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Unemployment low, job vacancies remain up in Q3: MOM

SINGAPORE: The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) said employment growth stayed high despite a rise in layoffs in the third quarter of this year.In a statement, MOM noted that job openings rose in the quarter, resulting in a rise in job vacancies to job seekers ratio.Meanwhile, the increase in layoffs remained substantially below recessionary highs. Total employment grew by 26,200 in the third...

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Yahoo considering purchase of news summarizing app Summly

Nick D'Aloisio, founder of Summly, speaks to the "CBS This Morning" co-hosts about his application that transforms the way people consume the news on mobile phones.Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is looking at buying Summly, an app created by boy genius Nick D'Aloisio to summarize news articles, according to a report from All Things D.Mayer met with the teenage D'Aloisio in recent weeks, unnamed sources told...

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Global Checkup: Most People Living Longer, But Sicker

If the world's entire population went in for a collective checkup, would the doctor's prognosis be good or bad? Both, according to new studies published in The Lancet medical journal.The vast collaborative effort, called the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010, includes papers by nearly 500 authors in 50 countries. Spanning four decades of data, it represents...

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Health-Exchange Deadline Looms

All of the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare," doesn't go into effect until 2014, but states are required to set up their own health care exchanges or leave it to the federal government to step in by next year. The deadline for the governors' decisions is Friday.The health insurance exchanges are one of the key stipulations of the new health care law. They will offer...

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UK government urged to consider relaxing drug rules

JUST say yes to considering relaxed drug controls, urged a panel of UK parliamentarians this week - but Prime Minister David Cameron has rejected the calls. Many countries have loosened their penalties for drug use, including the Czech Republic and Portugal, which...

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S'pore strongly urges N.Korea to work with international community

SINGAPORE: Singapore has strongly urged the North Korean government to refrain from further actions that would escalate tensions, and work with the international community to preserve peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula.A statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said North Korea's rocket launch on Wednesday is a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.It...

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Woman Tasered after trying to buy too many iPhones

Resisting arrest?(Credit:WMUR-TV Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)Normally, when you hear screams outside an Apple store, it's because, oh, the doors have opened and there's a new gizmo for the insatiable.However, at the Apple store in the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, N.H. on Tuesday, the screams were those of a 44-year-old Chinese woman being Tasered by police.As WMUR-TV reports, Xiaojie Li,...

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Hubble Discovers Oldest Known Galaxy

The Hubble space telescope has discovered seven primitive galaxies formed in the earliest days of the cosmos, including one believed to be the oldest ever detected.The discovery, announced Wednesday, is part of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field campaign to determine how and when galaxies first assembled following the Big Bang."This 'cosmic dawn' was not a single, dramatic event," said astrophysicist...

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McAfee Lands in Miami: I'm Free

Software mogul John McAfee has been released from detention in Guatemala City and has landed in Miami.Immediately upon landing, according to passengers on the plane, McAfee's name was called and he was whisked off the aircraft. Federal officials escorted the 67-year-old Internet antivirus pioneer through customs spirit him out a side door, out of the view of reporters, according...

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Today on New Scientist: 11 December 2012

Out-of-season's greetings from the Arctic frost flowers Season's regards from an icy meadow in the Arctic, but it's no winter wonderland and please don't dash out into itHow hacking a mosquito's heart could eradicate malaria Watch how a double-pronged trick helps mosquitoes remain healthy while carrying disease, a process that could be exploited to eliminate malariaNew drug lifts hard-to-treat...

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Britain 'deplores' N.Korea rocket launch

LONDON: Britain said it "deplored" North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket on Wednesday and vowed to summon the Asian country's UK ambassador to the Foreign Office."I strongly condemn the DPRK's satellite launch today," Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a statement."I deplore the fact that the DPRK has chosen to prioritise this launch over improving the livelihood of its people....

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BlackBerry 10 to feature deep integration of Evernote

It appears that BlackBerry 10 -- Research in Motion's next operating system -- will support deep integration of the online notes service Evernote.Now that RIM has released BlackBerry 10's SDK and APIs for software-makers to start coding in earnest, one of the apps in the new operating system generating buzz is a personal information manager (PIM) called "Remember." RIM hasn't publicly demonstrated...

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Best Space Pictures of 2012: Editor's Picks

Photograph courtesy Tunç Tezel, APOY/Royal ObservatoryThis image of the Milky Way's vast star fields hanging over a valley of human-made light was recognized in the 2012 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition run by the U.K.’s Royal Observatory Greenwich.To get the shot, photographer Tunç Tezel trekked to Uludag National Park near his hometown of Bursa, Turkey. He intended to watch the moon...

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Shooter Kills Self After Oregon Mall Rampage

A masked gunman opened fire today at Clackamas Town Center, a mall in suburban Portland, Ore., killing two people, injuring one, and then killing himself."I can confirm the shooter is dead of an apparent self inflicted gunshot wound," Lt. James Rhodes of the Clackamas County, Ore., Sheriff's Department said today. "By all accounts there were no rounds fired by law enforcement...

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Doha summit launches climate damage aid

The latest summit to stop climate change, held in Doha, Qatar, over the past two weeks has been roundly slammed. Little was agreed to curb greenhouse gas emissions and the latest modelling, carried out by the Climate Action Tracker consortium shows global averages temperatures are still set to rise by at least...

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Brief Facebook outage after infrastructure change

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook was unreachable briefly on Monday after the social network made a change to part of its infrastructure dealing with routing traffic to its online address."Earlier today, we made a change to our DNS infrastructure and that change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site," Facebook said in response to an AFP inquiry."We detected and resolved...

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Is Time Machine really backing up your drives?

A new report is out that suggests a fault may exist in Apple's Time Machine service, causing internal drives to be automatically and silently added to Time Machine's exclusion list, resulting in the service not backing up the data on these drives and not notifying the user of the change.As outlined on Diglloyd's Mac Performance Guide blog, this problem appears to be situational to setups where many...

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U.K. Dash for Shale Gas a Test for Global Fracking

Thomas K. Grose in London The starting gun has sounded for the United Kingdom's "dash for gas," as the media here have dubbed it.As early as this week, a moratorium on shale gas production is expected to be lifted. And plans to streamline and speed the regulatory process through a new Office for Unconventional Gas and Oil were unveiled last week in the annual autumn budget statement by...

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