Brown plans extensive changes for school funding in 2013

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown will push this year to upend the way schools are funded in California, hoping to shift more money...

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Go Bionic With These Wearable Arduino Projects

The emerging field of smart textiles, known as "Wearables" or e-textiles, has gained considerable momentum in the past few years as enthusiasts continue to build more and more complex projects with microcontrollers that keep growing in power while shrinking in size. The LilyPad Arduino microcontroller board helped bring a large developer community into Wearables with its debut in 2007; since then...

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Low-cost Chinese film sets new record

BEIJING (AP) — A low-budget, domestically produced comedy has unexpectedly become the highest-grossing Chinese film to date.Chinese state media say the wacky road movie “Lost in Thailand” has grossed more than 1 billion yuan ($ 160 million) since its Dec. 12 debut. The official Xinhua News Agency, citing an independent monitor of box office figures, said Wednesday that it also beat James Cameron‘s...

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Well: Good and Bad, the Little Things Add Up in Fitness

Phys EdGretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.The past year in fitness has been alternately inspiring, vexing and diverting, as my revisiting of all of the Phys Ed columns published in 2012 makes clear. Taken as a whole, the latest exercise-related science tells us that the right types and amounts of exercise will almost certainly lengthen your life, strengthen your brain, affect your waistline...

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With a Mall Boom in Russia, Property Investors Go Shopping

MOSCOW — Shoppers who find that 250 stores aren’t enough can go ice skating, watch movies or even ride a carousel, all under a single roof. While it sounds like the Mall of America, this mall is outside Moscow, not Minneapolis. “I feel like I’m in Disneyland,” Vartyan E. Sarkisov, a shopper toting an Adidas bag, said recently while making the rounds of the Mega Belaya Dacha mall. ...

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Ruling over bumper-car injury supports amusement park

SAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court, protecting providers of risky recreational activities from lawsuits, decided Monday...

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The Future Is Now: What We Imagined for 2013 — 10 Years Ago

Predicting the future is hard, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. We’re Wired, after all. Ten years ago, we boldly declared that we’d be living with phones on our wrists, data-driven goggles on our eyes and gadgets that would safety-test our food for us. Turns out, a lot of the things Sonia Zjawinski conceptualized in our “Living in 2013” feature way back in 2003...

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‘Rings’ trilogy sound editor Hopkins dies in NZ

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Oscar-winning sound editor Mike Hopkins, who worked on the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and other Peter Jackson films, has died in a rafting accident in New Zealand. He was 53.Hopkins drowned on Sunday when his inflatable raft capsized during a flash flood in a river on New Zealand‘s North Island, police senior Sgt. Carolyn Watson said. His wife survived.The New Zealand...

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Hispanic Pregnancies Fall in U.S. as Women Choose Smaller Families

ORLANDO, Fla. — Hispanic women in the United States, who have generally had the highest fertility rates in the country, are choosing to have fewer children. Both immigrant and native-born Latinas had steeper birthrate declines from 2007 to 2010 than other groups, including non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, a drop some demographers and sociologists attribute to changes in the views of many Hispanic...

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Senate Passes Tax Increases on Wealthy Americans

Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesSenator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, was surrounded by reporters as he walked to his office late Monday. WASHINGTON — The Senate, in a pre-dawn vote two hours after the deadline passed to avert automatic tax increases, overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday that would allow tax rates to rise only on affluent Americans while temporarily suspending sweeping,...

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