SEATTLE: When a chain of physical therapy centers wanted new patients, it aimed online ads at people near its offices who had bought knee braces recently on Amazon. When a financial services provider wanted to promote its retirement advisory business, it directed ads to people in their 40s and 50s who had recently ordered a personal finance book from Amazon.

A scientist at NASA animated how long it takes light to travel around Earth, to the moon, and to Mars. The movies show just how slow light can be.

Here we tell you what happens after you’re dead. Seriously. Okay, it’s not so serious, because you won’t actually die. To lay the groundwork, let’s recap the scientific view of death: essentially, you drop dead and that’s the end of everything. This is the view favoured by intellectuals who pride themselves on being stoic and realistic enough to avoid cowardly refuge in Karl Marx’s spiritual ‘opium’ – the belief in an afterlife. This modern view is not a cheerful one.

An 18-year-old Saudi woman who said she is fleeing abuse from her family has been granted asylum in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed Friday. Thailand’s immigration chief Surachate Hakparn said Rahaf al-Qunun has left Thailand for Canada on board a Korean Air flight.

The secretive canonical process, in which bishops determine the fate of the disgraced church leader, is underway in the Vatican.

Ubisoft has added a new quest to Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Like previous The Lost Tales of Greece quests, this latest escapade is free for all players. It's titled 'The Daughters of Lalaia' and it should give you something to do before the game's next DLC episode launches in the near future. Look, we've got to give Ubisoft credit here -- the company's been doing a great job of keeping Odyssey updated since the game released in October last year. New quests, bou...

Millions of Americans could face going without the benefit that allows them to purchase food if the government shutdown continues into February. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP or food stamps, costs an average of around $4.8 billion per month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But because of the government shutdown, the program has only $3 billion in emergency reserves for February.

Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres is campaigning hard for Kevin Hart to take back his spot hosting this year's Oscars. Kevin Hart stepped down from hosting last month after tweets from 2009-2011 resurfaced with derogatory language referring to gay people and disparaging comments about sexuality. Hart said at the time that he was giving up the job because he was sorry for the hurt he caused and did not want to be a distraction, and in another statement said he did not want to contribute to &quo...

Plans to teach basic first aid in schools have been welcomed by the British Heart Foundation. The charity calls the move a "decisive moment in the battle to improve cardiac arrest survival rates". There are 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the UK every year and fewer than 10% of these people survive. The survival rates double, however, in countries where CPR is taught in schools.

Going into the midterm elections, few candidates made the warming planet a keystone of their campaigns despite devastating fires and storms that scientists say have been worsened by carbon pollution. Climate change has typically been low on voters’ lists of priorities. But as a new Congress comes into power in January, that indifference could be changing.

Reading a great book (specifically nonfiction) is to acquire, within a matter of hours, the insights and knowledge that the author spent months, years, and sometimes decades developing. Books are therefore knowledge multipliers, shortcuts to years of research and thinking, and the more books you read, the more hard-won knowledge you accumulate in a fraction of the time.

Driving beyond South Africa's Limpopo province, into the village of Chivadini, people and grassland are scarce. But the oldest living organisms in Africa -- baobab trees -- are abundant. These spectral behemoths blend into the Saharan countryside and have been an icon of the African savannah since millennia. As the oldest seed producing trees in the world, their resilience -- some are more than 2,000 years old -- have earned them many names in myths, legends and folklore.

Small developers are losing confidence that Valve is earning its 30% of Steam sales, according to a new survey. In 2017, 39% of developers agreed that Valve had earned its share, but that number has dropped to 11% in this year’s survey. Lars Doucet, who has run this survey for three years, is quick to note that these results are not scientific – but they do put numbers to issues developers have lately been in heated discussions over.

The 281-acre plot of land in Wake County, which Apple purportedly considered for a new campus earlier this year, was this week sold to a recently established LLC called Acute Investments, reports WRAL Tech Wire. Scott Levitan, CEO of the Research Triangle Foundation, confirmed the sale concluded this week, but would not comment further on the deal. Apple is not officially attached to the purchase, but R. Bruce Thompson, a lobbyist connected to the tech giant, was named in the public documents. T...