Alberta University researchers Marcia Spetch and Vadim Bulitko have completed a study that probed deeper into the reasoning and decision-making process involved in hiding and seeking objects.

Among what they studied are the children's hide-and-seek game, police searches and video games like Half-Life 2. Aside from helping develop more realistic game environments, their study aims to help come up with higher search-enhancing tools for police officers.

Swaziland's King Mswati III has sparked outrage by sending his favorite wives on a globe-trotting shopping spree. The monarch - ruler of some of the poorest people in the world - used £4 million [$7 million] of state money to send at least five of his 13 wives and dozens of their aides to France, Italy, Dubai and Taiwan on a secret trip last week.

Although it is a criminal offense to criticize the king's private life in Swaziland, campaigners have blasted the British government, who give the landlocked African country the majority of the £65 million it receives in European aid each year.

Visiting the "Top 100 Dirtiest" websites exposes computers to an average 18,000 viruses that can damage it or steal its users information, according to the U.S. anti-virus firm Norton Symantec.

Websites in the list compiled by the Sunnyvale-California-based company can do the damage and secretly compromise computer systems without the visitor downloading or clicking anything from the site.

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform, is loaded with pointless messages rather than vital information, according to a new study. Pear Analytics, a San Antonio-based marketing firm, began its study based on the hypothesis that Twitter is "used predominantly for self-promotion." While the site reaches an estimated 27 million people per month in the United States, data shows only 27% of users are on regularly. In fact, Quantcast.com research claims only 1% of users contribute to over 35% of all traffic.

Looking at the kinds of data being created, Pear Analytics grouped messages, or "tweets" into several categories including news (from sources like AHN), spam (from adult websites and other marketing scams), self-promotion, conversation and "pointless babble" (these are the "I am eating a sandwich now" tweets).

In a wildlife reserve in Russia's Far East, a female bear has spurned natural instincts and adopted an orphaned cub.

A mother bear caring for a cub that's not her own is rare. Most orphans don't stand a chance at survival, as they are usually killed by adult bears, female bears or even other bear cubs, a spokesman for the Kronotsky National Nature Reserve told the news service RIA Novosti.