Lunar New Year celebrants get no rest after Western holidays

At her store in Chinatown, Tracy Tieu replaces red and green Christmas trinkets with red and gold Lunar New Year decorations...

Read More..

The Best of Exploration: Top 8 Stories of Space Exploration in 2012

Our recap of the year’s best exploratory exploits continues today with a look at the biggest developments in space exploration. 2012 saw the stunning debut of new spacecraft (Curiosity), the continued contributions of geriatric ones (Voyager), and the first full year since the end of the Space Shuttle program. Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society nominated 8 particularly meaningful developments from...

Read More..

Kardashian, West feel ‘blessed’ over baby news

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are feeling lucky about their first child together.“It’s true,” the 32-year-old reality TV star said in a statement on her site Monday. “Kanye and I are expecting a baby. We feel so blessed and lucky and wish that in addition to both of our families, his mom and my dad could be here to celebrate this special time with us.”Kardashian’s father,...

Read More..

F.D.A. Approves Sirturo, a New Tuberculosis Drug

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Monday that it had approved a new treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis that can be used as an alternative when other drugs fail. The drug, to be called Sirturo, was discovered by scientists at Janssen, the pharmaceuticals unit of Johnson & Johnson, and is the first in a new class of drugs that aims to treat the drug-resistant strain...

Read More..

Big in 2012, but the Future Is Hazy for Bonds

The big story in the markets this year was not about stocks. Americans sold off their stock mutual funds, the most popular way to invest in American companies, at the fastest clip since 2008, the year the financial crisis began. That occurred despite the fact that the stock market itself rose steadily; the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index ended the year up 13.4 percent....

Read More..

Republicans back off plan to trim Social Security

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans backed off a demand to trim spending on Social Security by changing the cost-of-living adjustment, a proposal Democrats say was a nonstarter...

Read More..

Wired Science's Top Image Galleries of the Year

Many of our most popular posts are image galleries, and this year our readers favorite collections included microscope photos, doomsday scenarios, auroras and lots of images of Earth from space.The satellite image above of Brasilia is part of the most popular post of the year.Above: I think it's safe to say that our readers like looking at images of Earth from space almost as much as we do. Satellite...

Read More..

“The Hobbit” keeps box office crown for third week

(Reuters) – The dwarfs and elves of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” prevailed at the North American box office again over the weekend, as its $ 32.9 million in ticket sales topped both the star-packed musical “Les Miserables” and the western “Django Unchained.”Despite surging past “The Hobbit” on Christmas day with an $ 18.1 million opening, “Les Miz” managed only third place in U.S. and Canadian...

Read More..

Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Revolutionary in the Study of the Brain, Dies at 103

Fabio Campana/European Pressphoto AgencyRita Levi-Montalcini, the Italian Nobel laureate, in 2007. Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neurologist who discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks, opening the way for the study of how those processes can go wrong in diseases like dementia and cancer, died on Sunday at her home in Rome....

Read More..

Media Decoder Blog: Among Top News Stories, a War Is Missing

Look closely at the end-of-the-year lists of 2012’s top news stories. What’s missing? The 11-year-old war in Afghanistan and American-led counterterrorism efforts around the world.The Pew Research Center’s weekly polling on the public’s interest in news stories showed such a low level of interest that the overseas conflicts didn’t make the organization’s list of the year’s top 15 stories.Nor did the...

Read More..