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Oil Dives Below $53 as U.S. Stocks Swell Wednesday March 30, 10:55 am ET LONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices dropped a dollar on Wednesday as U.S. inventory data showed a seventh straight weekly build in crude stocks and traders absorbed signs of slowing demand growth in China. ADVERTISEMENT U.S. light crude (CLc1) fell $1.33 to $52.90 a barrel, more than $4.50 below an all-time peak of $57.60 on March 17. London Brent (LCOc1) was down 93 cents to $52.10 a barrel. Prices dropped after the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a 5.4 million barrels rise in crude inventories last week...

LEICESTER, England -- In her 10th-grade math class, Frankie Teague dimmed the lights, switched on soothing music and handed each student a white board and a marker. Then, she projected an arithmetic problem onto a screen at the front of the room. "As soon as you get the answer, hold up your board," she said, setting off a round of squeaky scribbling. The simple step of having students hold up their work, instead of raising their hands or shouting out the answer, gives a leg up to a group of pupils who have long lagged in math classes -- girls....

What's wrong with this sentence? "Microsoft the company should big improve Word grammar check." A University of Washington associate professor ran it through the grammar check in Microsoft Word, and the software found it acceptable. Sandeep Krishnamurthy is now on a mission to get the software giant to tweak its grammar-check system. He says he discovered problems after scolding a student he'd given a poor grade for submitting a paper filled with grammatical errors. The student complained that she had used the software to check for errors. Microsoft says grammar is almost impossible for a computer to master because it...

Dow Jones News Reports at 11:39 "DJ Singapore Official: 7.5 Quake Hits Sumatra - Kyodo" No other reports yet.

SKELETONS in the closet were a real-life problem for Ashford Price when he opened a cupboard in his late aunt's bedroom to be confronted with dozens of human remains. The grand Georgian townhouse in the stately sweep of Swansea's leafy St James's Crescent had hidden a secret for decades until its owner, Brenda Morgan, 84, passed away. Police were immediately called after the discovery, but suspicions were dampened when it was noticed all the bones had been carefully cleaned and numbered. The remains were in fact 42 human skeletons dating back over 3,000 years to the Bronze Age. They had...

A number puzzle originating in the work of self-taught maths genius Srinivasa Ramanujan nearly a century ago has been solved. The solution may one day lead to advances in particle physics and computer security. Karl Mahlburg, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, US, has spent a year putting together the final pieces to the puzzle, which involves understanding patterns of numbers. "I have filled notebook upon notebook with calculations and equations," says Mahlburg, who has submitted a 10-page paper of his results to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The patterns were first discovered...