Thomas Bartlett and Paul Muldoon weren’t surprised that lines by Ireland’s great poet worked so well as song lyrics, writes Padraic Killeen

USA: The University of Illinois stakes claim to 23 Nobel Prize winners and tech prowess that contributed to the creation of YouTube, Netscape, Java, and Yelp.

Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash and his wife and his wife Alicia were killed in a taxi crash in New Jersey.

The Government has denied claims it had squandered its own mandate for change by missing an opportunity to secure a significant debt reduction deal for Ireland.

Tommy Gilbert Jr has been arrested on suspicion of shooting Tommy Sr, a rich Wall St investor. How did such a gilded life corrode? asks Lynnley Browning

A 30-year-old man shot his hedge fund founder father dead inside his New York apartment after the pair argued over the son’s allowance, police said.

Life is likely to last longer if it has a purpose and seems worthwhile, new research suggests.

SWISS CHAIN SORRY FOR ‘UNFORGIVABLE’ PACKAGING

Driven by exceptionally warm ocean waters, Earth smashed a record for heat in May and is likely to keep on breaking high temperature marks, US experts say.

Northern poet, Paul Muldoon, tells Richard Fitzpatrick about the power of words

New research estimates that Facebook will eventually suffer a catastrophic decline in users.

Monkeys perfect the art of conversation

The all-clear has been given after report of gunshots at one of the US’s most prestigious universities.

Sitting in Paris as the US’s first ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson reflected on how the new US government could avoid the errors of European “despots” who kept their people subjugated through war and debt.

Finding it hard to make ends meet can impoverish the brain and reduce your ability to think, say scientists.

Twitter has hired Nathan Hubbard, the ex president of Ticketmaster, as its first head of commerce, part of a push to enable shopping via short postings on its social website.

Princeton University has been evacuated due to an unspecified bomb threat.

A priest has said there is no foundation to charges against the Irish nanny accused of assaulting a one-year-old baby, who later died.

Top climate scientists have warned the world’s political leaders to get ready for more dangerous and “unprecedented extreme weather” caused by global warming.

Protesters who have been camping out in Manhattan’s Financial District for more than two weeks say they have no intention of giving up, following mass arrests at the weekend.

YOU might call it the cognitive divide — the split between an evidence-based worldview and one that is rooted in faith or ideology — and it is one of the most important fault lines in the United States today.

The youngest son of the late shah of Iran has been found dead in an apparent suicide at his US home.

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has won this year's Nobel prize for literature.

Embattled British Prime Minister Gordon Brown won some backing from a Nobel Prize-winning economist today, who said the UK economy looked to be faring the best in Europe.

US President Barack Obama has picked the first Hispanic in history to sit in the country’s highest legal body, the Supreme Court.

The new administrator of the US environmental agency said it was moving towards regulating the gases blamed for global warming, reversing the Bush-era policy.

IN HIS letter (November 17), Con Hayes argues that a full human person is not present until long after the early embryo stage in human development and it is therefore ethically permissible to kill the human embryo to further biomedical research.

SIMPLE victory may not be enough for Hillary Clinton in tomorrow’s Pennsylvania Democratic primary, as Barack Obama tries yet again to kill off her never-say-die White House bid.

US physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who had a key role in the development of the atom bomb and later gave the space phenomenon black holes their name, has died at 96.

IF Alan Greenspan was still in charge at the US Federal Reserve Bank it is probable that would have cut rates before now.

Google boss Eric Schmidt has been appointed to the board of directors of Apple Computers in a move that points towards a possible alliance between the two IT giants.

Scientists in the US have discovered an apparently straightforward formula for winning on the stock exchange: invest in companies with simple names.

A British academic has won a prestigious international prize worth €648,000, it was announced in Rome tonight.

In the final push, President George Bush and his opponent Senator John Kerry are saying more about less.

Rock legend Bob Dylan today received an honorary degree from a British university.

Music legend Bob Dylan is to be awarded an honorary degree by a British university, it was announced today.

The recording industry in the US sued another 477 computer users – including dozens of college students at schools in 11 states – accusing them of illegally sharing music across the Internet.

The recording industry in the United States sued another 477 computer users today – including dozens of college students at schools in 11 states – accusing them of illegally sharing music across the Internet.

Paul Newman has appealed to Princeton University to end a campus tradition in which participants binge drink, trying to consume a beer an hour for 24 hours.

WHEN Barbara Cassani sold the no frills airline Go to easyJet for £374 million, just four years after she had launched the company for British Airways, she made an estimated £16 million.

Israel's Foreign Ministry has accused the BBC of broadcasting blatantly biased reports about the country's Prime Minister in a bid to discredit the politician.