Herbal Viagra actually contains the real thing

IF IT looks too good to be true, it probably is. Several "herbal remedies" for erectile dysfunction sold online actually contain the active ingredient from Viagra. Michael Lamb at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and colleagues purchased 10...

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Kerry in Egypt to press for political consensus

CAIRO: US Secretary of State John Kerry was in Cairo on Saturday to push for a way out of Egypt's violence-wracked political impasse, underlining the need for a consensus to overcome a crippling economic crisis.As Kerry arrived from Turkey, protesters torched a police station in the canal city of Port Said which is entering its third week of civil disobedience, reflecting the size of the...

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Online note service Evernote latest firm to get hacked

Yet another company has fallen victim to a hack, with attackers breaking into systems at Evernote, maker of a Web-based note-taking application used by about 50 million people.The company said in a security notice that some user data had been accessed and that Evernote was requiring all users to reset their passwords. Apparently, though, no sensitive financial info was stolen, and no user content...

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We Didn’t Domesticate Dogs. They Domesticated Us.

In the story of how the dog came in from the cold and onto our sofas, we tend to give ourselves a little too much credit. The most common assumption is that some hunter-gatherer with a soft spot for cuteness found some wolf puppies and adopted them. Over time, these tamed wolves would have shown their prowess at hunting, so humans kept them around the campfire until they evolved into dogs....

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Rescuers Search for Man as Fla. Sinkhole Grows

Rescuers early Saturday morning returned to the site where a sinkhole swallowed a Florida man in his bedroom after the home's foundation collapsed.Jeff Bush was in his bedroom when a sinkhole opened up and trapped him underneath his home at 11 p.m. Thursday night.While the sinkhole was initially estimated to be 15 feet deep on Thursday night, the chasm has continued to grow. Officials...

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Mars trip to use astronaut poo as radiation shield

The man and woman aboard the Inspiration Mars mission set to fly-by the Red Planet in 2018 will face cramped conditions, muscle atrophy and potential boredom. But their greatest health risk comes from exposure to the radiation from cosmic rays. The solution? Line the spacecraft's walls with water, food and their own faeces....

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Obama blames Republicans for "dumb" cuts

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama on Friday blamed Republican refusal to compromise on deficit cutting for "dumb" and "unnecessary" spending cuts about to slam into the fragile US economy.The arbitrary and automatic $85 billion dollar cuts, known as the "sequester" will begin later Friday, in a self-inflicted wound brought about by deep ideological polarization between the president and...

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What's up with the sun? Plenty.

High-resolution image of a sunspot taken at the Sacramento Peak Observatory of the National Solar Observatory in New Mexico. We're currently in the midst of what scientists say is the sun's 11-year solar weather cycle and it's making for quite the show. Over the last few months, NASA and the European Space Agency have been recording solar flares as they erupt, tracking solar storms that send charged...

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Stinkbug Threat Has Farmers Worried

Part of our weekly "In Focus" series—stepping back, looking closer.Maryland farmer Nathan Milburn recalls his first encounter.It was before dawn one morning in summer 2010, and he was at a gas station near his farm, fueling up for the day. Glancing at the light above the pump, something caught his eye."Thousands of something," Milburn remembers.Though he'd never actually seen a brown marmorated...

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Obama, Congress Fail to Avert Sequester Cuts

President Obama and congressional leaders today failed to reach a breakthrough to avert a sweeping package of automatic spending cuts, setting into motion $85 billion of across-the-board belt-tightening that neither had wanted to see.Obama met for just over an hour at the White House today with Republican leaders House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell...

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Mystery ring of radiation briefly encircled Earth

What were you doing last September? The charged particles that dance around Earth were busy. Unbeknown to most earthlings, a previously unseen ring of radiation encircled our planet for nearly the whole month – before being destroyed by a powerful interplanetary shock wave. ...

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WikiLeaks: Manning says he wanted "public debate" on war

WASHINGTON: US Army private Bradley Manning told a military tribunal on Thursday that he leaked incident logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks in order to start a "public debate.""For me they represent the underground realities of the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan," Manning told the court, after his lawyer said he plans to plead guilty to some of the charges leveled...

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Google testing new navigation design borrowed from Chrome

Google tests a new navigation system for its services that dumps the controversial black bar.(Credit:Google Operating System)Google is testing a new version of its homepage that eliminates the controversial navigation bar that has sat atop its services for two years, the company said.The version now being tested requires users to click a grid icon borrowed from Chrome OS for links to Gmail, Google...

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Mars Missions: A Time Line of Success and Failure

Humans have been thinking about visiting Mars—or being visited by Martians—for more than a century. On Wednesday, a group funded by businessman Dennis Tito announced its intention to launch a manned flyby mission to Mars in 2018.Our awareness of Mars dates back millennia, while our modern picture of the red planet emerged in the 1870s, when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed...

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Benedict Departs Vatican for the Last Time as Pope

Pope Benedict XVI bade his final farewell to the faithful today, lifting off from the Vatican in a white helicopter as the first pope to resign in six centuries.Just before 5 p.m. local time, Benedict, 85, walked out of the Vatican for the last time as pope, waving to a cheering crowd in the Courtyard of San Damaso as he entered a black Mercedes for the short drive to a nearby...

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Quantum skyfall puts Einstein's gravity to the test

DIVIDING a falling cloud of frozen atoms sounds like an exotic weather experiment. In fact, it's the latest way to probe whether tiny objects obey Einstein's theory of general relativity, our leading explanation for gravity. General relativity is based...

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US Supreme Court takes up voting rights law

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court Wednesday took up the US voting rights law, a cornerstone of efforts to guard against a resurgence of racial discrimination in American states with a segregationist past.At issue is the 1965 law's Section 5, which requires nine mainly southern states and local governments in seven other states to obtain Justice Department approval for any changes in their...

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Tim McGraw samples new system to sell album in a status update

Tim McGraw turns to Facebook to sell his latest album.(Credit:Screenshot/Jennifer Van Grove) Country singer Tim McGraw wants you to buy his album -- on Facebook. Tuesday, the recording artist became one of the first people to try out a new system for selling through status updates on the social network. McGraw's team used e-commerce platform Chirpify to encourage Facebook fans to type "buy" in the...

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Bring on the Cuts: Some Want the Sequester

Mark Lucas wouldn't mind seeing America's defense budget cut by billions."There's quite a bit of waste within the military," Lucas, who serves as Iowa state director for the conservative group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), told ABC News. "Being in there for 10 years, I've seen quite a bit of it."With the budget sequester set to kick in on Friday, the former Army ranger is among...

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Today on New Scientist: 26 February 2013

Giant laser creates an artificial star to clear the sky The Very Large Telescope's new laser looks like something off the Death Star, but its powerful beam is used for the peaceful exploration of the galaxyRussian meteor traced to Apollo asteroid family The bounty of footage from dashboard-mounted cameras helped astronomers quickly calculate the orbit of the meteor and trace it to its home turfCuriosity's...

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Egypt opposition to skip polls over transparency fears

CAIRO: Egypt's main opposition coalition, the National Salvation Front, said Tuesday it will boycott upcoming parliamentary elections due to a lack of guarantees of a transparent process."The decision of the Front, unanimously, is to boycott the elections," NSF member Sameh Ashour told a news conference in Cairo after a meeting of the alliance grouping mainly liberals and leftists.Ashour...

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Ubuntu Touch OS heading to slew of smartphones, tablets

The Ubuntu Touch home screen on a tablet.(Credit:Ubuntu/Canonical)The Ubuntu Touch operating system is being ported to more than 20 types of smartphones and tablets.The developer preview of the Linux-based OS was released for the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones and Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets last week.And developers are working to port the OS to a far greater range of devices, including the...

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Sharks Warn Off Predators By Wielding Light Sabers

Diminutive deep-sea sharks illuminate spines on their backs like light sabers to warn potential predators that they could get a sharp mouthful, a new study suggests.Paradoxically, the sharks seem to produce light both to hide and to be conspicuous—a first in the world of glowing sharks. (See photos of other sea creatures that glow.)"Three years ago we showed that velvet belly lanternsharks...

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