If the new MacBook Air looks identical to its predecessor, then why is everyone making such a big deal about it? Because this ultraportable laptop beats the last Air and every Windows Ultrabook by a mile when it comes to endurance. Thanks to Intels new 4th generation Core (Haswell) processor and a beefier battery on the inside, the new Air doesnt need an extended battery or slice to last all day...

House Republican leaders want to push for outposts on the moon and Mars and they want to push NASA's plan to snare an asteroid into the dustbin, according to a discussion draft of their space spending plan."It is the policy of the United States that the development of capabilities and technologies necessary for human missions to lunar orbit, the surface of the moon, the surface of Mars, and beyo...

Our pre-caffeine roundup is a collection of the hottest, strangest, and most amusing stories of the morning.Facebook's throwing a press event to unveil some "big ideas" on Thursday. Rumor is that those ideas involve videos on Instagram.Speaking of Facebook ... the social network suffered some "internal issues" on Tuesday night.Google asked the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow ...

Facebook was down Tuesday night for some users, with an outage that seemed to peak at about 9 p.m. ET.The problem, a spokesman for the social network said, should be fully resolved."Earlier today, an internal issue in our Web infrastructure caused the site to be slow or unavailable for a brief period of time," Facebook said in a statement. "We resolved the issue quickly, and should now be back to ...

Facebook was down Tuesday night for some users, with an outage that seemed to peak at about 9 p.m. ET.The problem, a spokesman for the social network said, should be fully resolved."Earlier today, an internal issue in our Web infrastructure caused the site to be slow or unavailable for a brief period of time," Facebook said in a statement. "We resolved the issue quickly, and should now be back to ...

Facebook appeared to be down Tuesday night for some users. Website service monitoring site DownRightNow noted that as of 9:10 p.m. ET, the social network was dealing with a disruption, although it wasn't known how widespread it was.Going to Facebook's website resulted not in the usual sign-in, but this message for some "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we...

The National Security Agency is reviewing whether to stop collecting a vast stockpile of records of Americans telephone calls the most controversial component of its surveillance programs by allowing telecommunications companies to retain the data until U.S. intelligence officials have a specific reason to review it for possible connections to terror plots, U.S. officials said TuesdayThe NSAs...

By Tanya Lewis, LiveScienceAn eight-legged love tragedy may go something like this: The male spider approaches the female, who is four times his size. She scuttles away, but he creeps closer and closer. Finally, he takes hold of her with his spindly legs, climbs aboard and inserts his "penis" into her genital opening and discharges a jet of sperm. Then quite abruptly his legs curl underne...

By Douglas Main, LiveScienceYeti crabs don't comb their hair to look good they do it because they're hungry.These bizarre deep-sea animals grow their food in their own hair, trapping bacteria and letting it flourish there before "combing" it out and slurping it up. The crabs are found near cold seeps and hydrothermal vents, places where mineral-rich water spews out of the seafloor.Like many a...

BOSTON Microsoft said that an assault it led earlier this month on one of the world's biggest cybercrime rings has freed at least 2 million PCs infected with a virus believed to have been used to steal more than $500 million from bank accounts worldwide. "We definitely have liberated at least 2 million PCs globally. That is a conservative estimate," Richard Domingues Boscovich, assistant general...

FORT MEADE, Md. - The court-martial of the U.S. soldier accused of providing reams of classified documents to WikiLeaks in a case illustrating the challenge of keeping secrets in the digital age must decide whether tweets and Web pages can be admitted as evidence.Lawyers for Private First Class Bradley Manning, 25, who is accused of providing more than 700,000 files to the anti-secrecy websit...

It doesn't take an Einstein to see that international differences can still crop up on the final frontier: Take the case of the European Space Agency's Einstein cargo craft, for example. Russian concerns about some potentially moldy cargo bags caused a holdup in the schedule for unloading seven tons of supplies.The Albert Einstein Automated Transfer Vehicle linked up with the International Space S...

By John Flesher, APFAIRPORT, Mich. -- A wooden beam embedded at the bottom of northern Lake Michigan appears to have been there for centuries, underwater archaeologists announced Tuesday, a crucial finding as crews dig toward what they hope is the carcass of a French ship that disappeared while exploring the Great Lakes in the 17th century.Expedition leaders still weren't ready to declare they had...

Google asked the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to allow it to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests it receives separately from criminal requests, on First Amendment grounds. In its filing, Google requested the court to allow it to publish the aggregate number of national security requests it receives, including disclosures under the Foreign Intelligence...

Texas residents will have a little more protection from the prying eyes of local law enforcement than the rest of America starting in September. A law that takes effect in the fall ends warrantless email searches by state law enforcement officials, in a step that might have implications for email snooping laws around the country.The new law cancels out a Texas provision that had allowed state, cou...

By Megan GannonLiveScienceU.S. investigators have recovered and returned historical documents that were stolen two decades ago from Russia's archives, including letters by Catherine the Great and composer Pyotr Ilyich TchaikovskyThe eight documents, which had been missing since the early 1990s, are among dozens of historical papers suspected to have been smuggled out of the country after the chaot...

By Robert Z. PearlmanSpace.comAnn McClain's mother was in her front yard rose garden when her daughter called with the news."You'll never forget this moment," McClain, a 34-year-old Army major, told her mom. "I've been selected as an astronaut candidate."Her mother's response, to scream so loud that McClain's stepfather ran out of the house thinking his wife had just injured herself, was rivaled o...

By: Megan GannonLiveScienceThe little sounds and puffs of air that toddlers often inject into their baby babble may actually be subtle stand-ins for grammatical words, new research suggests.For their study, Cristina Dye, a Newcastle University researcher in child language development, made recordings of tens of thousands of utterances of French-speaking children between 23 months and 37 months old...