Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, will consolidate its control over NBCUniversal by buying out the 49 percent of the media company that it doesn’t already own. Comcast will pay General Electric $16.7 billion for the shares and shell out $1.4 billion for related real estate, including the iconic 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Under a deal announced in 2009, General Electric spun NBC, Universal Studios, and various other media properties off into a new joint venture and sold 51 percent of the shares, and effective control, to Comcast. The merger was intensely controversial. Critics charged that the acquisition would further cement Comcast’s already dominant position in the cable market, making it impossible for competitors such as Netflix to compete on a level playing field. But regulators decided not to challenge the merger, settling for a long list of regulatory concessions. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
View original post here:
Comcast acquires full ownership of NBCUniversal ahead of schedule
pigrabbitbear writes “Complex, socially-tiered societies require complex communication. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that eusocial animals like ants are also incredibly communicative — more so than we previously understood, according to a new study in Current Biology. Many ants begin communicating acoustically from a very young age, in fact, in such a way that scientists suggest may be very important to their survival. As explained in an article by Carrie Arnold at ScienceNow, scientists believed until only recently that ants communicated only through pheromones, leaving, for example, scent trails behind them for other ants to follow — hence the phenomenon of single-file marching ants. (They can also, newer research suggests, use magnetic and vibrational landmarks to guide themselves around.)” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
