Black Friday 2013 at Wal-Mart

"Black Friday is our Super Bowl, and we plan to win." So said Wal-Mart's chief marketing officer Duncan MacNaughton. And exactly how does Wal-Mart plan to crush the competition this Black Friday?: By rewriting the old rules on everything from its door-buster deals to its price-matching policies.  With Wal-Mart changing the rules of Black Friday, shoppers need to use new strategies to score the best deals, too. Here Alison Southwick...

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Thanksgiving Recipe

Stuffing or dressing can be found on nearly every Thanksgiving table, but it’s one of the toughest holiday menu items to pull off well. It’s too dry. It’s too wet. It’s under seasoned. It’s over seasoned. You get the idea: there’s always something just a little off. Not to worry, we have you covered with four fantastic stuffing and dressing recipes. And we’re not stopping there - we’re going to give you a never-fail recipe for turkey gravy! 4 cups...

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Rarer than Panda

In the dust of the Gobi desert in China’s far west, ultra-modernity sweeps past an eddy of industrial history in one of railway transportation’s most remarkable close encounters. Hundreds of kilometres of track are being laid to connect the country’s bullet-train network with Xinjiang, a region bordering on Central Asia. Near Sandaoling, a grim and remote mining town on the edge of Xinjiang, the new line runs close to the world’s largest concentration...

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NYC's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

The big balloons soared along with the crowd’s spirits Thursday as the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade made its way through the streets of New York City. There had been some concerns about whether the wind could keep 16 giant balloons grounded after a wet and blustery storm hit the East Coast a day earlier. But the cherished tradition prevailed when the New York City Police Department decided Thursday that winds were calm enough. Balloons have...

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Bitcoin under pressure

All currencies involve some measure of consensual hallucination, but Bitcoin, a virtual monetary system, involves more than most. It is a peer-to-peer currency with no central bank, based on digital tokens with no intrinsic value. Rather than relying on confidence in a central authority, it depends instead on a distributed system of trust, based on a transaction ledger which is cryptographically verified and jointly maintained by the currency’s...

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Coment Ison likely didn't survive sun encounter

Comet Ison likely didn't survive its graze past the sun early this afternoon, astronomers say. "It's not looking good for Ison in my opinion," said Phil Plait, an astronomer who writes for Slate's Bad Astronomy blog, during a Google Hangout organized by NASA Thursday. "That's kind of my assessment too," agreed Karl Battams, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., who runs the NASA-funded Sungrazing...

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Sharkeisha: sucker-punching teen turns viral sensation

If you've been on the web at all in the past 24 hours, chances are you've seen the name "Sharkeisha" pop up. She's gone viral on Facebook, has hit the top of Google's search results, and on Wednesday evening her name was at the top of Twitter's trending topics list, leaving many to ask: Who isSharkeisha and why is she so popular? Unfortunately, her story is not a happy one. Sharkeisha is the name of a young...

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