In a series of tests at Cambridge University, birds had to compete against boys and girls aged four to ten.In two of the three tests, birds did just as well as children up to seven years old.The tests was modeled on Aesop’s fable in which a thirsty crow can drink from a pitcher if it uses pebbles to raise the water level to within its reach.In the first task, both the birds and children quickly realized that adding stones to a cylinder half-filled with water would raise the water level.But in th

U.S. actress Kristen Stewart publicly apologized for cheating on her boyfriend, Robert Pattinson, with the married director of “Snow White and the Huntsman.”　The longtime couple are the stars of the romantic “Twilight” vampire film franchise and have been dating for several years.Several media outlets reported Tuesday Stewart, 22, recently had a brief fling with director Rupert Sanders, who is 41, married and the father of two children. TMZ said Stewart publicly confirmed the affair Wednesday an

French archaeologists have discovered a roughly 5,000-year-old pharaonic solar boat in an expedition in Abu Rawash, west of the Egyptian capital, the antiquities ministry said on Wednesday.The antiquities minister, Mohammed Ibrahim, said the boat was up to 5,000 years old. “It goes back to the era of Pharaoh Den, one of the First Dynasty kings,” he said in a statement.The six-metre (19.6 feet) long and 1.5-metre wide boat “is in good condition,” he added. Its planks are now undergoing renovation

An 89-year-old South Carolina woman said she used her .38-caliber pistol to ward off two men who broke into her home.Ruby Hodge of Blenheim said she heard knocking on her door just after 8 a.m. Monday and was on her way to answer when two men forced their way through the door, the Florence Daily News reported Wednesday.Hodge said she retrieved the gun, which belonged to her late husband, from beneath her mattress and the men arrived at her bedroom to find her pointing the revolver at them.“They

A British designer says his line of sarcastic tote bags for London residents annoyed by the Olympic Games is proving popular.Toby Leigh said he took great care not to violate any Olympic copyrights when he created the totes, which are modeled on the London 2012 logo but do not contain the word “Olympics” or any associated symbols, The Sun reported Tuesday.“You can‘t use the words London 2012 or the Olympic rings, but they can’t copyright the word London,” Leigh said. “The typeface isn‘t the same

  Police in the Pittsburgh area said they believe a bear seen crossing a road was trying to get to a mall where another bear was captured Sunday.Frazer police said the bear, estimated to weigh 300 pounds, was seen several times around the Northbound side of Route 28 between 8 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Sunday nearby the mall where a smaller bear was captured Saturday, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Monday.Officers said they stopped traffic on the road around 9 p.m., when it appeared the bear was

Ratings agency Moody‘s on Tuesday lowered the outlook on the EU’s bailout fund from stable to negative, after threatening the triple-A credit ratings of three of the eurozone‘s major guarantors.Moody’s said its decision to lower the outlook on the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) reflected the changes in outlooks on Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. But it maintained the EFSF‘s triple-A rating.The ratings agency said that although outlook changes for those countries “imply an

Apple's new mac OS X 'Mountain Lion' has been released on Wednesday.When Apple releases its quarterly earnings report at the end of the business day Tuesday, Mac users can also anticipate the official release of the upgraded operating system, dubbed Mountain Lion.“We’re thrilled with record sales of 17 million iPads in the June quarter,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “We’ve also just updated the entire MacBook line, will release Mountain Lion on Wednesday and will be launching iOS 6 this Fall. We are

U.S. astronomers have released what they say are the highest-resolution images ever captured of the Sun’s corona, its million-degree outer atmosphere.NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, on July 11 launched a sounding rocket and captured the 16-megapixel images in an extreme-ultraviolet wavelength of light.“Even though this mission was only a few minutes long, it marks a big breakthrough in coronal studies,” Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said.The new i