There's a new slogan for weight-watchers: Burn it like Beckham. A friendly game of soccer, a new study has found, works off more fat and builds up more muscle than jogging. Danish scientists, who conducted their research on 37 men, also found the soccer players felt less tired after exercising than the joggers because they were having more fun. "This is good news for men who prefer to...

Disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk has relocated his research base to Thailand to avoid the ethical disputes his work would cause in South Korea, a scientist close to Hwang said Wednesday. Hwang and some 10 associates have been working at a national university laboratory in the southeast Asian country since June, said Park Se-pill, a Cheju National University professor and well-known...

Before they leave for Iraq, thousands of troops with the 101st Airborne Division line up at laptop computers to take a test: basic math, matching numbers and symbols, and identifying patterns. They press a button quickly to measure response time. It's all part of a fledgling Army program that records how soldiers' brains work when healthy, giving doctors baseline data to help diagnose and...

NASA has capped funding for a remote sensor being developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory for the Mars Science Laboratory rover. "We didn't stop their work, but they're vastly overpriced and we have not been able to curtail that," said Alan Stern, head of science at NASA in Washington, D.C. NASA told the project "you have to finish with the money you have," Stern said Tuesday....

One of the big complaints lodged against wireless phone companies is poor signal quality inside buildings, especially homes. Sprint Nextel Corp. is trying to overcome that obstacle with a device that boosts wireless signals indoors and directs the calls over the Internet. The Airave, which Sprint will begin selling Monday in its stores in parts of Denver and Indianapolis, increases cell...

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. :-) Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes -- a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis -- as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message. To mark the anniversary Wednesday, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for...

Time was, small-business owner Evan Prytherch considered eBay capable of performing e-commerce magic. Prytherch would list his entire music-accessory inventory on the auction Web site and within days it all seemed to disappear. Sold. But in recent years, much of that magic is gone, Prytherch says. Shoppers are simply not buying all the inventory anymore. Some items languish without a single...

When Austin Sweazy pulled into the parking lot of an auto-repair shop, his fiancee reminded him that even though their errand inside would last just a few minutes, it would be smart to lock the car doors. After all, she said, "you don't want anybody to steal your GPS." Sweazy heeded her advice. But it didn't matter. In the few minutes the couple were inside the store, a thief smashed the...

BlackBerry is joining the Wi-Fi parade. Research In Motion and AT&T have announced that the BlackBerry 8820 -- the first with Wi-Fi connectivity -- will be available on Thursday. Wi-Fi use on mobile devices is becoming a new standard for both consumer and business users who want fast, easy access to the Internet when not at home or in the office. In announcing the 8820, RIM said that the new...

Penryn and Nehalem. They appropriately sound like a Greek warrior and a biblical king, and they are leading the charge in Intel's roadmap as outlined Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco. Intel has talked about the chips as part of its "tick" and "tock" roadmap -- its new clocklike strategy of accelerated innovation, with a new manufacturing process one year followed by a...

Nokia's business smartphones have a new, thin family member today. On Tuesday, the Finnish mobile phone giant announced the "slim and elegant," stainless steel E51 -- continuing the Eseries push to replace desktop phones. Successes with Eseries handsets helped Nokia's enterprise unit turn a profit last quarter following many losses. The newest model, sporting Wi-Fi, HSDPA, and quadband GSM/EDGE...

Google Gadget Ads made their official debut on Wednesday. Google describes Gadget Ads as nontraditional ad units with rich-media capabilities that let advertisers target audiences and allow users to interact with ad content. Gadget ads can incorporate rich media such as real-time data feeds, images, and video in a single creative unit. Gadget ads can be developed using Flash, HTML, or a...

Researchers are publishing security vulnerabilities this week that could offer attackers new ways to get into the enterprise. Mozilla updated its Firefox Web browser on Tuesday to thwart attacks that target a flaw in Apple's QuickTime player. Meanwhile, security researchers detailed new vulnerabilities in Windows and Windows Media player. First up is a year-old issue with Apple's digital media...

The science is clear and the time short, but the political will is lacking to confront global warming, the U.N. secretary-general said Tuesday. Ban Ki-moon said he hoped next Monday's "climate summit" here will help galvanize leaders to take action "before it is too late." Asked at a news conference about President Bush's planned separate meeting to discuss global warming measures among...

"What did politicians say about Iraq?" Ask that question of Google and the top result is something less than authoritative. It's an entry on a blog called Doug's Darkworld. And the text is more about Kurdish politicians than American ones. This example actually indicates a key search problem. How's a search engine to know what kind of politicians the user is thinking about? Execs at Powerset, a...

IBM has just unleashed a new enterprise-grade suite of office productivity applications. Called Lotus Symphony, the free software release includes separate word processor, spreadsheet, and business presentation applications that are squarely targeted at the capabilities of Microsoft Office. As part of IBM's strategy for promoting the Open Document Format (ODF), Symphony builds upon Big Blue's...

Move over, quad-core and dual-core chips. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced late Monday that it would release a triple-core Phenom processor for desktop computers by early 2008. One week after releasing its quad-core Opteron chip for servers, the Sunnyvale, California chipmaker said that the x86 Phenoms are "expected to be the world's first PC processors to integrate three computational cores...

Google Docs, a Web-based platform for creating, sharing, storing, and publishing documents, has offered capabilities for word processing and creating spreadsheets, but has been missing a major piece of the Microsoft Office puzzle -- until now. On Monday, Google added business presentation software, the element that many analysts said was preventing the Web-based office suite from contending with...

European antitrust regulators' victory over Microsoft was a resounding smack at the software maker's old business practices, but it left analysts divided as to how the company's new businesses, including Windows Vista, might be affected. Last year, Microsoft faced complaints from rivals about the way the pending Vista operating system handled search, antivirus security and certain document...

Apple's iPhone officially has a phone company partner in the UK. After weeks of rumors, Apple announced Tuesday that O2 -- the largest UK mobile phone operator -- would be its exclusive wireless carrier there. The UK launch is scheduled to take place on Friday, November 9, with iPhones sold through Apple and O2 stores, as well as through 1,300 Carphone Warehouse locations. The price for the...

A package of Dole salad mix that tested positive for E. coli has triggered a recall in at least nine states, prompting new produce fears almost exactly a year after a nationwide spinach scare. The tainted bag of Dole's Hearts Delight salad mix was sold at a store in Canada, officials said. Neither Canadian health officials nor Dole Food Co. have received reports of anyone getting sick from...

For the first time, an osteoporosis drug has reduced deaths and prevented new fractures in elderly patients with broken hips, according to new research. Some experts called the drop in deaths "striking" but said other drugs could have a similar effect. In the study, there were 28 percent fewer deaths and 35 percent fewer fractures in the group that got a once-a-year infusion of the bone...

Leaky hydraulic seals on space shuttle Discovery must be replaced, and the extra work may end up delaying next month's flight, a NASA official said Monday. NASA plans to replace the seals in the right main landing gear strut later this week with help from contractor BF Goodrich, said George Diller, a space agency spokesman. The job includes removing the brakes, wheels and tires, and NASA was...

Staying healthy is a costly business in the United States, particularly in the Northeast, government statistics show. Annual health care spending per person totaled $6,409 in New England and $6,151 in the rest of the Northeast, compared to a national average of $5,283, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports in Tuesday's issue of the journal Health Affairs. The totals...