Some Arctic seals now officially listed as threatened with extinction

First came the polar bear. Now, the federal government has added two other marine mammals to the list of creatures threatened...

Read More..

Facebook Shares Fall Briefly Amid Report of Instagram Quitters

The fallout from Instagram’s terms of service change that wasn’t actually changed continued Friday. Facebook, which owns the popular social media app, saw its stock price fall 3 percent amid a report that the TOS flap cost Instagram 25 percent of its users.Whether that number is accurate — Instagram insists it isn’t — was almost beside the point as Facebook saw shares fall to $25.22 before...

Read More..

Matt Damon tackles “fracking” issue in the “Promised Land”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The hot-button topic of “fracking” has finally made its way to Hollywood in the new movie “Promised Land,” out in U.S. theaters on Friday, with actors Matt Damon and John Krasinski teaming up to further the debate on the energy drilling technique.The film explores the social impact of hydraulic fracturing drilling technique, or “fracking,” which has sparked nation-wide environmental...

Read More..

Surgery Returns to NYU Langone Medical Center

Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesSenator Charles E. Schumer spoke at a news conference Thursday about the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center. NYU Langone Medical Center opened its doors to surgical patients on Thursday, almost two months after Hurricane Sandy overflowed the banks of the East River and forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients. While the medical center had been treating...

Read More..

USC football: Matt Barkley will not play in Sun Bowl

Matt Barkley winces in pain after being sacked during USC's loss to UCLA. ...

Read More..

No One Uses Smart TV Internet Because It Sucks

People aren’t using their internet-connected smart TVs for anything beyond, well, watching TV. It turns out, nobody wants to tweet from their TV. Or read books. Or do whatever it is people do on LinkedIn. Worse, more than 40 percent of the people who buy a connected TV aren’t even using it for its ostensible primary purpose: getting online video onto the biggest screen in your home. What gives?We...

Read More..

“Rescue Me” singer Fontella Bass dies aged 72

(Reuters) – American soul singer Fontella Bass, who topped the R&B chart in 1965 with the song “Rescue Me,” died in St. Louis. She was 72.Bass died in hospice care on Wednesday night from complications of a heart attack she suffered three weeks ago, her daughter, Neuka Mitchell, told Reuters. Bass had also suffered from strokes in recent years.“She’s going to be missed,” Mitchell said. “Her big...

Read More..

New York’s Mental Health System Thrashed by Services Lost to Storm

Marcus Yam for The New York TimesDr. Richard Rosenthal, physician in chief of behavioral services for Continuum hospitals, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. When a young woman in the grip of paranoid delusions threatened a neighbor with a meat cleaver one Saturday last month, the police took her by ambulance to the nearest psychiatric emergency room. Or rather, they took her to Beth Israel...

Read More..

Toyota to pay at least $1.2 billion to settle sudden-acceleration lawsuit

...

Read More..

Apple Patents a Method for Bending Glass

Flat glass is boring. All the fanciest Android phones sport curved glass displays. Not to be left out of the display-warping ways, Apple has patented its own glass-bending process.Apple’s patent illustrates a system of using heat during the slumping process to mold glass to a particular shape. Slumping is the bending of glass over a mold. The alignment system can be...

Read More..

Natalie Portman, Kristen Stewart most bankable Hollywood stars

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Actresses Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart are Hollywood’s most bankable stars and provide studios with the highest average returns for their films, according to Forbes.com.Academy award winner Portman topped the list of best actors for the buck, providing about $ 42.70 for every dollar she earns.“Black Swan,” for which she won her best actress Oscar, was produced for an estimated...

Read More..

News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track

How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets? Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought...

Read More..

Senators Returning With Little Urgency as Fiscal Clock Ticks

WASHINGTON — President Obama and members of the Senate are set to return to Washington on Thursday to make a last-ditch effort at a deal to avert more than a half-trillion dollars in automatic tax increases and spending cuts just five days before they start kicking in. Even with so much at stake, there appeared to be little sense of urgency. Senate aides say most senators are not likely to...

Read More..

Problems with new 787 Dreamliner continue to plague Boeing

Aerospace giant Boeing Co. just can't seem to escape trouble with its new 787 Dreamliner passenger jet.More than three years...

Read More..

A Look Inside Tarantino's <em>Django Unchained</em> Comic Book

Django Unchained opens in theaters today, but the big screen isn’t the only way to see the newest work by Quentin Tarantino. The issue of the Django Unchained comic book mini-series from DC/Vertigo Comics is available now in comic book stores (and online), and in advance of tomorrow’s film debut, Wired has a look at the Tarantino’s introduction to...

Read More..

Queen delivers 1st Christmas message in 3D

LONDON (AP) — Queen Elizabeth II has hailed the holidays in a new dimension, delivering her Christmas message for the first time in 3D.In the annual, prerecorded broadcast, the monarch paid tribute to the armed forces, “whose sense of duty takes them away from family and friends” over the holidays, and expressed gratitude for the outpouring of enthusiasm for her Diamond Jubilee celebrations.The queen...

Read More..

Square Feet: Moving Ahead to Update the Pier 17 Mall

Nearly two months after Hurricane Sandy devastated the South Street Seaport on the East River in Lower Manhattan, Dumpsters still line its cobblestone streets and nearly all of the stores west of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive remain closed. But the storm surge largely spared Pier 17, the seaport’s long-maligned shopping mall to the east. The operators of the mall, the Howard Hughes Corporation...

Read More..

Dueling Santa trackers are off and running

A screen grab from Google's Santa Tracker. (Google / December 24, 2012)...

Read More..

Army Goes Goth With 'Super-Black' Materials

Get ready to break out the eyeliner and the candelabras, because the Army is going goth.In its latest round of solicitations for small businesses, the Army is asking for proposals for super-black material. That is, material so black that it absorbs 99 percent of all light. But it isn’t really black paint, exactly. The plan is to use either an “antireflective coating or surface treatment process...

Read More..