By Emma Charlton When the young Philip Roth warned his parents to brace for a media assault with the release of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969, his mother broke down in tears: she thought he was suffering from delusions of grandeur. Four decades after the novel shot him to stardom, the American literary giant talks candidly [...]

A Google search for “world water shortage” will produce more than four million results in 0.17 seconds. It will also use a tenth of a teaspoon of water, experts say. Given water’s role in power generation, the impact of about 300 million Google searches a day is around 150,000 litres daily – in a world [...]

Pretty young women and older men of means – ‘sugar babies’ and ‘sugar daddies’ – are pairing up thanks to a US website that openly offers companionship for money, but balks at the word prostitution. SeekingArrangement.com (SA) – which bills itself as the “premier Sugar Daddy dating site” – does not beat around the bush. [...]

The Moon is 4.36 billion years old, up to 200 million years younger than thought, according to analysis of lunar rocks reported in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. The estimate comes from a new dating of isotopes of lead and neodymium found in samples of ferroan anorthosite, a crustal rock that derives from magma. [...]

The international community’s mixed response to China’s crackdown on dissent – ranging from public criticism to total silence – has handed Beijing leeway to maintain its hard line, experts say. Since Chinese authorities, apparently spooked by the pro-democracy uprisings sweeping the Middle East, began detaining lawyers, artists and other activists in February, a parade of [...]

The world’s biggest particle collider set a new record this week, a feat that should accelerate the quest to pinpoint the elusive particle known as the Higgs Boson, a senior physicist said. “Last night, a symbolic frontier was crossed,” said Michel Spiro, president of the board of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), explaining [...]

By V.S.Gopalakrishnan I am a Tamilian from Chennai and living in Mumbai, India, on an educational and recreational trip to this beautiful island of Bali. The history, culture and wonders of nature of this island attracted me on to this trip. Over the last few days whatever I have seen, absorbed and learned are really [...]

Franco-Turkish researchers have found that a deadly 1999 earthquake in Turkey was preceded by seismic signals, raising hopes of a predictive system for future tremors as Japan reels from its disaster. Studying copious data from the period just before the quake hit Turkey’s northwestern Kocaeli province on August 17, 1999, the seismologists discovered what they [...]

The massive earthquake that devastated northeastern Japan has shifted the country more than two metres away from the neighbouring Korean peninsula, scientists said. The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASSI) said the Korean peninsula moved east up to five centimetres while Japan shifted some 2.4 metres east. Consequently, the distance between the countries increased [...]

The number of ionternet users worldwide has mushroomed to reach the two billion mark, the head of the UN’s telecommunications agency, Hamadoun Toure, has said. The number of mobile phone subscriptions also reached the symbolic threshold of five billion, the secretary general of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) said. “At the beginning of the [...]

Scientists are moving closer to coming up with a non-physical definition of the kilo after discovering the metal artefact used as the international standard had shed a little weight. Researchers caution there is still some way to go before their mission is complete, but if successful it would lead to the end of the useful [...]

It began with an innocent legacy from an elderly aunt, when she bequeathed Jean-Guy Laquerre an early 20th-century papier-mache Santa Claus figure two decades ago. But with the passage of time a nascent fascination with all things Christmas has turned into an obsession for the retired teacher, who has now won himself a place in [...]