Microsoft is distributing some holiday cheer to Windows Phone owners today with an email inviting them to activate a bonus 20GB of SkyDrive storage.

President Barack Obama said he will act in January on the recommendations of an advisory panel suggesting changes to government surveillance programs. “What we’re doing now is evaluating all of the recommendations that have been made,” Obama said at ...

North Korea sent a fax to South Korea on Thursday, threatening to "strike mercilessly without notice" after protests against the secretive regime this week in Seoul.

AOL is finalizing negotiations to sell off Winamp and Shoutcast in a deal that would allow both products to live on, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions. The company (which owns TechCrunch) announced last month that as of December ...

On most Wednesdays, the Pope gives a general audience, and this one was packed. It was a balmy October morning, and more than a hundred thousand pilgrims, tourists, and Romans had funnelled into St. Peter’s Square. It was the first of three large gat ...

People's lives would be more fulfilling if they were given greater freedom in the workplace

With today’s headlines hyping “Second Code Uncovered Inside the DNA,” you might think that scientists are running around in circles in their labs, tearing out their hair, and screaming, “Crick, you loser!” But the real reaction of scientists to these ...

In 2001, a small U.S. special operations force had won extraordinary victories in Afghanistan and closed in on Bin Laden before high-level blunders allowed him to escape into Pakistan.

Drugs that boost brainpower are increasingly being taken by healthy people to study or work harder. Could this become the norm, or a condition of employment? Would you let your child get on a bus driven by someone on mind-altering drugs? What about h ...

The founder of the New York City-based custom closet design company Clos-ette, Melanie Charlton, 37, does a lot of yoga and dance, but says she has had some of her best workout results sitting down.

To date, there has been no way to run apps on Android with real and reliable privacy controls. Android version 4.3 and higher take a huge step in the right direction, letting users install apps while denying some of the apps' attempts to collect ...

Recently we published some photos of used T-shirts we found in a couple of markets in Kenya. One shirt in particular caught our eye. The shirt had a name inside it (Rachel Williams) and a bat mitzvah date (Nov. 20, 1993). We wanted to close the loop ...

As the nation’s top college football teams prepare to take the field for the elite bowl games, three new reports out this week raise similarly troubling concerns about dismal graduation rates for many of the black players constituting the bulk of the ...

The most strange and surreal abandoned places around the world.

A village in Madagascar has been hit by a deadly outbreak of the bubonic plague, medical experts on the island have confirmed. Test were carried out after at least 20 people in the village, near the north-western town of Mandritsara, were reported to ...

Patricia Churchland, a neurophilosopher at the University of California at San Diego, says our hopes, loves and very existence are just elaborate functions of a complicated mass of grey tissue. Accepting that can be hard, but what we know should insp ...

After Manning’s initial leaks were published, WikiLeaks' profile took the world stage. The site was subsisting on online donations from citizens around the world who were becoming increasingly interested in the idea that states should have nothi ...

Skyrim is a computer game set in the mythical world of Tamriel, where human intercourse consists of fighting, stealing, magic and trade. Whether you’re here, or in the deep space of EveOnline, or among the low-life in Grand Theft Auto V, the economic ...

India’s Unique Identification project, also known as Aadhar, earlier this week finished capturing demographic and biometric data of over half a billion residents–the largest biometric project of its kind currently in the world.

At the same time that human beings are facing multiple, unprecedented environmental calamities including climate change, acidification of the ocean, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, melting icecaps, ground water pollution, and other ecological catastr ...