No one has ever witnessed a male baboon forcing a female to have sex with him. Now a French-English research team thinks they have found the reason: raping her is simply unnecessary. The males use a much more subtle and longer-term strategy to get the amount of sex they want. "When I was in the field and observing the baboons, I often noticed that males were directing unprovoked attacks or chases toward females [in heat]," says Alice Baniel, an evolutionary biologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France, and lead author of the study.

The rodents - which were engineered to lack a sense of smell, put on a high-fat diet and ate just much as their non-engineered counterparts - lost an average of 16 percent of their body weight. Mice with enhanced olfactory senses gained weight. It seems the smell of delicious food is enough to make you gain weight. "Weight gain isn t purely a measure of the calories taken in," lead researcher Andrew Dillin said. "It s also related to how those calories are perceived."

The Dubai-based online retailer Souq.com announced on Monday that its sale to e-commerce giant Amazon has been completed. The $650 million deal, initially announced in March, allows Amazon to capitalize on Souq.com’s leadership in Middle East and North Africa, which accounts for as much as 78 percent of e-commerce in the region.

Prices for internet ADSL services are scheduled to increase by 4 percent starting from September, a source from the communications ministry told state news agency MENA on Sunday. This increase is said to be part of a planned rise in value-added tax from 10 to 14 percent, which was introduced in September 2016, the source added.

The research and development departments of the world s defense companies have barely begun to explore all the different uses for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), or drones. And governments, aware of this, are growing increasingly keen to find out what else they can do. In early June, the European Commission came up with a new plan to hand out 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) of taxpayers money to arms companies every year to develop new military technology.

It s usually a good idea when walking around town to look up and ahead. Occasionally you might also like to look left and right - for instance, while crossing a road. So put those phones away and soak up your environment. In Lindau, look up and you might even learn something. This small town on Lake Constance in southern Germany has a new "Science Trail," which aims to explain the science behind the discoveries that have won Nobel Prizes. There s even an app to go with it. So, okay, you can get those phones out again.

Lawmakers on Monday increased pressure in closed-door talks with auto industry leaders ahead of national elections in Germany on September 24. The government has demanded that the auto industry cover the costs and wants a solution to be presented before the elections. The transport ministry is in discussions with German auto industry associations VDA and VDIK as well as representatives from local governments to try and cut nitrogen oxide pollution by about 25 percent, sources told Reuters news agency.

Ask a stupid question, get a good answer, that s my method. And it worked in conversation with Nobel laureate W.E. Moerner. "Science itself is not an alternative fact. We have no alternative but to use scientific enquiry to make the proper choices to improve the world for the future," Moerner told DW at the 67th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. Moerner, a chemistry professor at Stanford University in the United States, won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Eric Betzig and Stefan Hell. He s speaking on the panel of a Deutsche Welle Press Talk at Lindau called "Science in the Post-Truth Era."

Facebook Inc (FB.O) is in talks with Hollywood studios about producing scripted, TV-quality shows, with an aim of launching original programming by late summer, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The social networking giant has indicated that it was willing to commit to production budgets as high as $3 million per episode, in meetings with Hollywood talent agencies, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. on.wsj.com/2scl2NV

A college project to re-distribute food for sale in retail outlets close to sell-by date is a remarkable success in Ireland, so the concept is catching on in Britain with the potential to be adopted throughout the world. Aoibheann O’Brien remembers that first box of food five years ago. O’Brien and co-founder Iseult Ward picked it up at a farmers’ market and dropped it off to a youth services centre in Dublin. “We thought, ‘we feel great about this.’ It was artisan sausages and really nice sourdough bread and I think there was raw milk as well,” O’Brien said.

Energy labels are hugely exaggerating the efficiency of televisions, fridge-freezers and dishwashers - with some appliances consuming almost twice as much energy as they claim to. That s according to a survey of European Union products, which show that domestic appliances seriously fail to measure up to their purported energy efficiency savings when tested outside the laboratory in real-world conditions. The findings are reminiscent of Dieselgate. The tests revealed that the current outdated official test formats on which appliances color-coded A to G gradings have been based are "vulnerable to misuse."

Think we re on the back foot with cybersecurity? Well the deeper we explore space the more we are going to need an interplanetary internet, and the more we ll need it to be secure. Could photon entanglement help? When E.T. said he wanted to phone home in 1982 he probably wasn t bothered about using a secure line. He just wanted to call his people back home. In 2082, millions of humans in colonies on the moon or Mars might also want to phone home - if our dearly beloved planet still exists. And they probably will want a secure line.

An additional seven websites have been blocked in Egypt, raising the total number of blocked sites to at least 101 as of Tuesday. The Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE) published on its website on Tuesday that newly blocked sites include Akhbar al-Sabah, Hermes Press, Waraa el-Ahdath, Sada net, Al-Araby TV, Masr al-Ekhbaria, and Aml al-Ommah.

The Global Cyber Security Index (GCSI) ranked Egypt’s advances in cyber security as the 14th worldwide out of a total of 165 countries, and second among the Arab states, in a report published on Monday. The GCSI ranks countries based on the pillars of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Global Cyber Security Agenda: legal, technical, organizational, capacity building and cooperation. Oman came in as the top country in cyber security followed by Egypt, at 14th worldwide; Qatar, at 25th worldwide; Tunisia, at 40th worldwide; Saudi Arabia, at 46th; and the United Arab Emirates at 47th worldwide.

DW: When it comes to gravitational waves - was Einstein right? Karsten Danzmann: Of course he was right. We didn t really have a doubt about that. Still, it was a big challenge to directly listen to the universe and not just indirectly, or just look at the universe with our eyes. For thousands of years we have only looked at the universe, but the sense was missing. Now, finally, with detecting gravitational waves we are also able to hear the universe and this whole new sense opens the dark side of the universe that we ve never had any glimpse of before.

How do rainbows form? First things first - why do we even get to see glorious arches of color in the sky? It all has to do with the various colors contained in what we perceive as white sunlight. When seen through a prism, it splits into different colors which come from the different wavelengths of lights. A rainbow is born when sunlight hits raindrops in the atmosphere. Each little droplet works as a prism, which splits up the light and makes for one of the most beautiful weather phenomena nature has to offer. What colors are in a rainbow? Starting on the outside, the colors in a rainbow are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. In English speaking countries, children sometimes learn to remember them with the acronym Roy G. Biv. There s even a spiffy song about a magical elf with that same name. Quick sample: "Roy G. Biv is a colorful man and he proudly stands at the rainbow s end."

Five additional websites offering VPN services, including TunnelBear, CyberGhost, Hotspot Shield, TigerVPN and ZenVPN were blocked on Tuesday, along with news websites Yanair Gate and Avaaz, raising the total number of websites blocked in Egypt to 62. “Egypt has expanded its website ban to include VPN sites that allow users to bypass blocked servers by re-routing connections through servers abroad,” the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE) said on Tuesday.

For whatever reason, working from home has tended to suffer from something of an image problem over the years. Take how "The Simpsons" depicted it back in 1995: Homer bends the rules so he can do his job as a nuclear safety inspector from home but his laziness and the lack of supervision in his living room almost causes a nuclear meltdown at the power plant. Yet while office banter about home workers slacking off has stubbornly persisted, the remarkable technological changes in communications of the last two decades combined with rapidly evolving social attitudes around a so called "work-life balance" have helped make telecommuting a reality for millions of people.

Minister of State for Military Production Mohamed Saeed el-Assar, and President of Cairo University Gaber Nassar inaugurated on Sunday a solar power station with a capacity of 660 kilowatts to feed 13 buildings in the university campus and the building of the Arab Council for Postgraduate Studies.

A court in Switzerland has convicted a man on several counts of defamation after he “liked” libelous comments on the social media platform. The court in Zurich found that the man indirectly endorsed and further distributed the comments by using the ubiquitous Facebook (FB, Tech30) “like” button.

How long has our species been around? New fossils from Morocco push the evidence back by about 100,000 years. The bones, about 300,000 years old, were unearthed thousands of miles from the previous record-holder, found in fossil-rich eastern Africa. The new discovery reveals people from an early stage of our species’ evolution, with a mix of modern and more primitive traits.