TOKYO - PANASONIC Corp said it would launch in April in Japan plasma TVs that are a quarter of the thickness and consume half as much electricity as conventional models, in a bid to stir up demand amid a spreading recession.
MILWAUKEE - WATCH an advertisement on a video screen in a mall, health club or grocery store and there's a slim - but growing - chance the ad is watching you too.
Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer's gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity - and can change the ads accordingly.
WASHINGTON - SPENDING more hours watching television or playing video games as a teenager may lead to depression in young adults, according to a study published on Monday.
Researchers looked at the exposure to electronic media of 4,142 adolescents who were not depressed when the study began in 1995, before DVDs and the Internet were widely used.
WASHINGTON - USE of chocolate in what is now the United States may go back 1,000 years, scientists say.
Evidence of chocolate was been found in a canyon in the southwest state of New Mexico, the earliest indication of the tasty substance north of Mexico, Patricia L. Crown of the University of New Mexico and W. Jeffrey Hurst of the Hershey Centre for Health and Nutrition report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
