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The Microsoft Corporation today announced that it has offered to buy all of Internet pioneer Yahoo!, Inc.’s outstanding shares, a bid worth around $44.6 billion, 62 percent above Yahoo!’s closing price on Thursday. Microsoft is seeking a bigger chunk of the online advertising market, which is predicted to grow from more than $40 billion last year to nearly $80 billion by 2010. Google, Inc., which currently has a lock on such advertising, stands to benefit most from this growth unless Microsoft and Yahoo!...

Blue duds win judo matches? Maybe not Researchers scored a takedown this week on a 2005 study that found an inexplicable advantage for judo players in blue outfits squaring off against contenders wearing white in the 2004 Olympics. The finding implied that maybe the blue was more intimidating or made blows harder to see coming. Skeptical, evolutionary biologists from Scotland and the Netherlands took a closer look at the Olympic matchups and noticed that because of the way the tournament was structured, higher-seeded grapplers wore blue more often than white (they alternated outfits, or judogi, between matches), and blue-clad contestants were more likely to have had extra rest between matches as well as more matches to that point than their white-garbed opponents....

Key Concepts Psychology Brain Theory of the Mind Brain states Introduction You have probably been told that one ought not lie. And you probably hope that people tell the truth to you. But have you ever thought of lying as an interesting social ability? Lying is actually tied to empathy, the ability to see things from another person’s perspective. Most humans begin to develop these skills around the age of three, when they begin to understand that what they know about the world might be different from what other people know about the world....

From Nature magazine More than 40% of tuberculosis infections that are resistant to front-line treatments are also resistant to some common backup drugs, according to research published this week in The Lancet1. Efforts to control tuberculosis are being hampered by the emergence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) strains of the disease, which resist treatment with two front-line antibiotics, rifampicin and isoniazid. In some parts of the world, as many as 50% of tuberculosis cases are resistant to these drugs2....

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romania’s government capped the amount of renewable energy that large industrial consumers must buy this year in a move to help offset their high energy costs and stave off the threat of job cuts ahead of elections later this year. The cap is part of a wider set of measures the leftist government plans to enforce this year to help industrial consumers, who have repeatedly warned that high power and gas prices could lead to production cuts, layoffs and even plant relocations....

How do humans and other animals distinguish between the smell of rotting seafood or the enticing allure of a ripe banana? New research at New York University Langone Health and their colleagues uses artificially created odors to help reveal the intricate chain of events that allow one odor to be distinguished from another. The results were published today in Science. In the deep recesses of the nose are millions of sensory neurons that, along with our eyes and ears, help conjure the world around us....

When my wife, Elizabeth, was pregnant, she had a routine ultrasound exam, and I was astonished by the images. The baby’s ears, his tiny lips, the lenses of his eyes and even the feathery, fluttering valves in his heart were as crisp and clear as the muscles and tendons in a Leonardo da Vinci drawing. Months before he was born, we were already squabbling about whom he looked like. Mostly, though, we were relieved; everything seemed to be fine....

People can process short sentences and solve equations before they’re aware of the words and numbers in front of their eyes, finds new research that suggests we might not actually need full consciousness to perform rule-based tasks like reading and arithmetic. In a series of experiments at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, more than 300 student participants were unconsciously exposed to words and equations through a research technique known as Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS)....

The first humans venturing onto the Tibetan Plateau, often called the “roof of the world,” faced one of the most brutal environments our species can endure. At an average elevation of over 4,500 meters, it is a cold and arid place with half the oxygen present at sea level. Science has long held that humans did not set foot in this alien place until 15,000 years ago, as suggested by archaeological evidence of the earliest known settlement on the northeastern fringe of the plateau 3,000 meters above sea level....

Dear EarthTalk: Recently the U.N. voted to declare access to safe and clean water a “human right”. Isn’t that a no-brainer? What are the ramifications of this declaration?—P. James, Boston, Mass. In July 2010 the United Nations (UN) agreed to a new resolution declaring the human right to “safe and clean drinking water and sanitation”. One hundred twenty-two nations voted in favor of the resolution; 41 (primarily developed) countries abstained; and there were zero “no” votes....

The scandal over Volkswagen AG’s use of software to circumvent federal air pollution standards in some of its diesel cars broadened yesterday to include some Porsche and Audi models, U.S. EPA said. Continued testing after the first deceptions were announced in September revealed that an additional 10,000 Audi, Porsche and VW diesel-fueled vehicles have been sold that also contain “defeat devices” designed to evade air pollution tests, EPA officials said yesterday....

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The rebirth of an extinct frog species may come from the freezer, not the stomach. The gastric brooding frog, when it existed on Earth, swallowed its eggs, transformed its stomach into a womb and vomited up its young once sufficiently grown. But the frog disappeared from the mountains of southern Australia shortly after it was discovered in the 1970s, persisting only as a few frozen specimens in the bottom of a scientist’s freezer....

Even during the simple act of commuting to work, we can’t escape the ubiquitous noise that invades our lives: Traffic rumbling down the street, a jackhammer at a construction site, the roar of the subway—not to mention music and podcasts we pump directly into our ears. Yet for many years conventional wisdom has held that as long as we could pass a hearing test, everything was fine. That is until 2009 when researchers uncovered a phenomenon called “hidden” hearing loss—a likely contributor to the cumulative loss typically associated with aging....

After spending a decade exploring Saturn, NASA’s Cassini mission is in the midst of a “Grand Finale,” a series of close passes between the planet and its rings that will culminate on September 15 with the spacecraft’s self-immolation via a dive into the planet’s upper atmosphere. That fiery conclusion is for more than dramatic effect, serving as a way to ensure astrobiologically interesting Saturnian moons such as Titan and Enceladus remain unsullied by any microbes that may have hitchhiked on Cassini from NASA’s clean rooms all the way to the outer solar system....

For decades cosmologists have wondered about the nature of dark energy, the proposed antigravitational force behind the accelerating expansion of the universe. Since the 1990s astronomers have observed that the universe is not only expanding, but also increasing its expansion rate. This is very strange, because the collective gravitational pull of all the “stuff” in the universe would be expected to eventually reverse cosmic expansion, or at least slow it down....

(Reuters) - The eye of Hurricane Joaquin is passing over Samana Cay in the Bahamas, the National Hurricane Center said in its latest advisory on Thursday. The hurricane is located about 80 miles (125 km) south southeast of San Salvador, Bahamas, with maximum sustained winds of 125 miles per hour (205 km/h), the agency said. “A turn towards the northwest and north is expected on Friday, and a faster motion towards the north is expected Friday night and Saturday,” the Miami-based weather forecaster said....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineA 90-year-old tuft of hair has yielded the first complete genome of an Aboriginal Australian, a young man who lived in southwest Australia. He, and perhaps all Aboriginal Australians, the genome indicates, descend from the first humans to venture far beyond Africa more than 60,000 years ago, and thousands of years before the ancestors of most modern Asians trekked east in a second migration out of Africa....

The most interesting developments in technology are never the gadgets themselves. It’s how they impact society. Even decades into the cell-phone revolution, for example, we’re still trying to figure out how to fit them into our lives. What are the rules for making phone calls in public places? For e-mail during meals? And above all, for using them in cars? Recently I wrote about Motorola’s new Moto-X cell phone. Like most smartphones today, you can control it by voice: have it read new text messages aloud (and dictate replies), check your e-mail, dial a number for you....

The renowned Slydini holds up an empty box for all to see. It is not really a box—just four connected cloth-covered cardboard walls, forming a floppy parallelogram with no bottom or top. Yet when the magician sets it down on a table, it looks like an ordinary container. Now he begins to roll large yellow sheets of tissue paper into balls. He claps his hands—SMACK!—as he crumples each new ball in a fist and then straightens his arm, wordlessly compelling the audience to gaze after his closed hand....

NASA’s new asteroid-sampling mission will do a lot of interesting things, but helping prepare humanity for Earth’s imminent destruction is not among them. There is indeed a chance that the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid Bennu—the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch next month—could hit Earth late in the 22nd century. But, mission officials stressed, that chance is slim, and the space rock is not nearly big enough to pose an existential threat to the planet, despite what some media reports claimed over the weekend....