Call it survival of the slowest: Extraordinarily old, bizarrely low-key bacteria have been found in sediments 100 feet below the sea floor of the Pacific Ocean, far removed from sunlight, fresh nutrients and what humans would consider anything interesting to do.

doesn’t think news outlets spent enough time covering Mitt Romney’s prep-school past in the wake of The Post’s article last week about the presidential candidate’s adolescent “pranks.”

“The media dropped the story too quickly,” Trudeau tells Comic Riffs.

So in his Pulitzer-winning comic “Doonesbury,” Trudeau himself has decided to pick the story back up again. Next week’s strips will satirize Romney’s current recollections of his teen years — specifically his part in pinning down a schoolmate and cutting the boy’s hair...

Regina Spektor had warned me that she wouldn’t let me hear her sing. Now we were sitting outside the L.A. studio of her producer, Mike Elizondo, where she’d been laying down initial tracks of piano and voice for her sixth solo record, “What We Saw from the Cheap Seats.” And still she wouldn’t budge.

“Everybody who’s ever made records feels that way,” Spektor explained. “You’re in a room and you’re working on it and it’s just an engineer and a producer. And then someone comes over, and you play the song for them. The way you hear it in that instant is very different than how you’ve been listening to it. If you do it really early you interrupt the process with other frequencies. It’s almost like a certain kind of coat of color. You can’t take it off once you’ve listened to something with a stranger in the room. And at that point everybody’s a stranger. It could be your mom.”...

For the first time in U.S. history, most of the nation’s babies are members of minority groups, according to new census figures that signal the dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority.

Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian American or in other minority groups. That’s almost a full percentage point higher than the 49.5 percent of minority babies counted when the decennial census was taken in April 2010. Census Bureau demographers said the tipping point came three months later, in July...

Drinking a daily cup of coffee -- or even several cups -- isn't likely to harm your health, and it may even lower your risk of dying from chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests...

In a clinical trial that could lead to treatments that prevent Alzheimer’s, people who are genetically guaranteed to develop the disease — but who do not yet have any symptoms — will for the first time be given a drug intended to stop it, federal officials announced Tuesday.

Experts say the study will be one of the few ever conducted to test prevention treatments for any genetically predestined disease. For Alzheimer’s, the trial is unprecedented, “the first to focus on people who are cognitively normal but at very high risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.//

“Swimming is my salvation,” Ms. Sherr writes. “Swimming stretches my body beyond earthly limits, helping to soothe every ache and caress every muscle. But it is also an inward journey, a time of quiet contemplation, when, encased in an element at once hostile and familiar, I find myself at peace, able — and eager — to flex my mind, imagine new possibilities, to work things out without the startling interruptions of human voice or modern life. The silence is stunning.”...

3-D printing is a hot topic right now, especially with reports of this incredible technology entering the consumer marketplace. The prices are dropping as more companies attempt consumer-grade machines. Is it time to start looking forward to a time when we all have a Star Trek-like replicator at home to produce everything we want, when we want it?...

Imagine an underwater world without whales, sharks, and dolphins, where jellyfish and algae rule. It's already happening, says marine biologist Callum Roberts in his new book, The Ocean of Life...

Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter. “If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith...