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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China bank lending rises in November

SHANGHAI: Chinese banks boosted lending in November from October, official figures showed Tuesday, as Beijing seeks to preserve the budding recovery in the world's second largest economy.Chinese banks extended 522.9 billion yuan ($83.9 billion) in new loans last month, up from 505.2 billion yuan in October, the central bank said in a statement.But the figure was below market expectations...

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Patent trolls now behind most patent infringement lawsuits

Patent trolls are for the first time behind the majority of patent infringement lawsuits filed in the United States, according to a study conducted by a patent law professor in California.About 62 percent of all patent lawsuits filed this year up to December 1 were brought by patent assertion entities (PAEs), which are created to extract licensing fees from other companies rather than make products...

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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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Woman Gets Life for Lottery Winner's Murder

DeeDee Moore, the Tampa woman accused of swindling and then killing lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare, was found guilty today of first degree murder and other charges, after she declined to take the stand and the defense rested without calling a single witness.In addition to the murder charge, Moore was also found guilty of possessing and discharging a firearm resulting in...

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Female lemurs avoid the wrong love in the dark

IT IS the ultimate voice-recognition system. Without ever meeting him, a female lemur still knows the call of her father. The ability to identify family members is important to avoid inbreeding. For large-brained mammals like apes that engage in complex...

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Tortoiseshell craftsmen adapt to new century

PARIS: What did Yves Saint Laurent, Jackie Kennedy and the architect Le Corbusier have in common? Their eyewear, for one, as clients of the luxury French tortoiseshell artisan, Bonnet.Four decades after the trade in tortoiseshell was banned under the 1973 CITES convention, the fourth-generation family firm sees itself as custodian of a rare craft, fashioning made-to-measure spectacles...

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IBM pushes silicon photonics with on-chip optics

This close-up photo shows an IBM chip wired up with both electrical links, shown in yellow, and optical waveguides, shown in blue. Conventional computers today transfer data with electrons traveling along electrical links, but researchers hope higher data-transfer speeds can be achieved by sending photons on optical links.(Credit:IBM Research)IBM has advanced the technology of silicon photonics, fabricating...

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Plants Grow Fine Without Gravity

When researchers sent plants to the International Space Station in 2010, the flora wasn't meant to be decorative. Instead, the seeds of these small, white flowers—called Arabidopsis thaliana—were the subject of an experiment to study how plant roots developed in a weightless environment.Gravity is an important influence on root growth, but the scientists found that their space plants didn't...

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Fiscal Cliff Talks: Boehner, Obama Meet Face-to-Face

For the first time in more than three weeks, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner met face-to-face today at the White House to talk about avoiding the fiscal cliff.White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest would offer no details saying only, "The lines of communication remain open."Erskine Bowles, the co-creator of a debt reducing plan, who was pessimistic...

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