Solar Activity Heats Up

April 14, 2011: If you've ever stood in front of a hot stove, watching a pot of water and waiting impatiently for it to boil, you know what it feels like to be a solar physicist.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded this X1.5-class solar flare on March 9, 2011. [movie]

Back in 2008, the solar cycle plunged into the deepest minimum in nearly a century. Sunspots all but vanished, solar flares subsided, and the sun was eerily quiet.

"Ever since, we've been waiting for solar activity to pick up," says Richard Fisher, head of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. "It's been three long years."

Nvidia officially nods for SLI on AMD motherboards

AMD 900 series chipset with SLI

Although it was already rumoured back in March, Nvidia has now officially confirmed that it is licensing SLI technology to motherboard makers for use with AMD CPUs, so that AMD's upcoming, performance-oriented Bulldozer chip can be used with a pair of Green Goblin GPUs.

On its blog, NVidia's Tom Petersen confirmed the rumours that have been around for quite some time and announced that motherboards based on AMD's upcoming 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets will have SLI support, in case you want to go that way. Tom Petersen mentioned Asus, MSI, Gigabyte and ASRock as first manufacturers that will offer SLI-enabled boards, but other vendors are also expected to join.

ICANN hires hacker to keep Internet safe

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – The agency in charge of the world's Internet addresses on Thursday appointed veteran hacker Jeff Moss to be its chief of security.

Moss, whose hacker name is Dark Tangent, is the founder of Black Hat computer security conferences as well as an infamous DefCon gathering of hackers that takes place annually in Las Vegas.

Moss will begin work Friday at the Washington, DC offices of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as vice president and chief security officer.

"I can think of no one with a greater understanding of the security threats facing Internet users and how best to defend against them than Jeff Moss," said ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom.

Superman threatens to renounce U.S. citizenship

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Superman, citizen of the world?

The Man of Steel, in the latest issue of Action Comics which hit newsstands on Wednesday, said he intends to renounce his U.S. citizenship in a speech before the United Nations.

"I'm tired of having my actions construed as instruments of U.S. policy," Superman said in a short story in the issue, Action Comics No. 900 from the Time Warner Inc unit DC Comics.

In the comic, Superman never actually renounces his citizenship, he only talks about his plans to do that.

But conservative commentators reacted with disgust to the new storyline, given that the fictional superhero has long proclaimed he stood for "Truth, Justice and the American way."

Sony Blames Long PSN Outage on a 'Criminal Attack'

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Sony's PlayStation Network and Qriocity music service are still down. The outage, which could soon become fodder for late-night comedians, is in its 11th day, with no specific timetable for being back online. The company did say that it expects to have "some services up and running within a week."

In an FAQ posted Thursday on the official PlayStation Blog, Nick Caplin, head of communications at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, wrote that the company realizes the "outage has been frustrating" to users, and Sony is "taking steps to make our services safer and more secure than ever before."

'Criminal Attack'

The FAQ attempts to answer a variety of questions that at least some of the 75 million affected PSN users have been asking. Among other things, Sony had previously described the shutdown as the result of an "external intrusion," but now the FAQ describes it as "a criminal attack against our system and against our customers," and said the company is working with law enforcement.

Former Miss USA says she felt "violated" by TSA agent

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A former Miss USA who says she felt "helpless and violated" during a pat down by a female airport security guard in Dallas, Texas has started a Twitter campaign on her blog to stop "invasive" body searches.

Susie Castillo, 31, who won the Miss USA Pageant in 2003, says she was hand searched after she refused to go through a full body scanner at the Dallas Fort Worth International airport.

"To say that I felt invaded is an understatement," Castillo wrote on her blog. "What bothered me most was when she ran the back of her hands down my behind, felt around my breasts, and even came in contact with my vagina!"

Castillo also tearfully recounts the April 21 incident in a five-minute video on her website.

Tornadoes devastate South, killing at least 281

PLEASANT GROVE, Ala. – Firefighters searched one splintered pile after another for survivors Thursday, combing the remains of houses and neighborhoods pulverized by the nation's deadliest tornado outbreak in almost four decades. At least 281 people were killed across six states — more than two-thirds of them in Alabama, where large cities bore the half-mile-wide scars the twisters left behind.

The death toll from Wednesday's storms seems out of a bygone era, before Doppler radar and pinpoint satellite forecasts were around to warn communities of severe weather. Residents were told the tornadoes were coming up to 24 minutes ahead of time, but they were just too wide, too powerful and too locked onto populated areas to avoid a horrifying body count.

New laser will be powerful enough to rip apart space itself

The European Commission has approved the construction of three gigantic new research lasers, with the option for a fourth that would, for an instant, be several hundred times more powerful than the entirety of the power generated by our civilization. The hope is that this will be enough energy to actually conjure virtual particles out of nothingness.

At peak power, the fourth laser in Europe's Extreme Light Infrastructure project (or ELI) will combine ten beams into a single pulse measuring 200 petawatts. 200 petawatts is significantly more power that our entire race generates at any given moment, and in fact more total power than Earth receives from the sun.

No more stealing hotel towels, washable RFID tags are here

How do you justify paying for a swanky luxurious hotel that costs $200 a night? By stuffing your suitcase with as many hotel "souvenirs" as possible. Anything and everything from towels to shampoo bottles, toothbrushes, bath robes, slippers, etc. are applicable. Say hasta la vista to those klepto habits because hotels are beginning to track their towels with RFID chips.

17 standing desks that will help you live longer

Sitting at a desk all day staring at computer or shuffling papers might sound like a familiar routine for many (including us bloggers), but did you know it could increase your chance of dying early by 20 percent (if you're a male) and up to 40 percent (if you're a female)? Yep, sitting is actually bad for your health, even if parking your behind in $8,000 god-chair feels really good.

We've got 17 stand-up desks and workstations that'll keep your posture straight and possibly keep you alive longer, ranging from the professionally made, weekend DIY projects and even, erm, "homemade" solutions. Click into the gallery below to get started. LINK

Transforming Safe House tells the zombie hordes to bring it

There's being prepared for a zombie invasion by keeping a shotgun and some sparebrains in your basement, and then there's being actually eager for a zombie invasion, which is how you'll feel if you live in this absurdly safe house, called the Safe House. And yes, it even has that drawbridge you've always wanted.

Here's a robot that can catch two balls at once

Don't have anyone to play catch with? Well, the Rollin' Justin robot is capable of catching not just one but two balls at once, once in each hand, which is more than I can say about most people.

By using onboard cameras and processing, this bot is able to track two balls coming at it and adjust itself into position within two centimeters of where it needs to be in a mere five milliseconds. What results is a catch rate of better than 80%. No, it's not gonna get brought in by the Yankees anytime soon, but it sure beats bouncing a ball off the side of the garage.

Oh, hey, apparently it can brew a cup of coffee, too. Check it out in the video below.

Rejoice! George R.R. Martin finally finishes A Dance With Dragons

Watching Game of Thrones play out on TV is awesome, but something way more fantastic happened today: After years of waiting and waiting, George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons is finally done.

That name first appeared way back during the novel release of Game of Thrones and was meant to be the title of the second of the Ice and Fire books. Little could any of us (or even Martin himself, for that matter) have known in 1996 that we would only be glimpsing that story now.

Zack Snyder's Superman finds a female villain—but which one?

It's official: The female villain in director Zack Snyder's Superman reboot, Man of Steel, will be Faora, and Snyder has also found an actress to play the role.

According to Variety, German actress Antje Traue, last seen by alongside Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster in Pandorum, will join a cast that already includes Henry Cavill as Superman, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Michael Shannon as General Zod and Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Superman's adopted Earth parents, the Kents.

Apple vs. Microsoft - Which company has the best response to problems?

It’s been interesting to watch how Apple responded to the the iOStracking ‘scandal‘ and comparing that to how Microsoft has handled the problems surrounding updates for its Windows Phone 7 lineup.

Following the widespread revelation that iOS devices were collecting and storing location data Apple took a few days to assess the problem and then went public with a detailed Q&A press release outlining the issue and what the company was going to do about it. Things then went a step further as Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who is currently on medical leave of absence (for what doesn’t matter, it could be an ingrowing toenail), along with Apple executives Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller, took to the phones.

Google Will Soon Steal Apple's App Store Crown, Study Says

Well, Apple. It was nice while it lasted. Kinda.

New data coming out of the Dutch analytics firm Distimo reports that Apple's App Store will soon no longer house the largest number of apps for any mobile platform. By July, it claims, Google's Android Market will overtake it as the "World's Biggest App Store."

Coming just a few days following a study that showed potential smartphone buyers were more interested in Android than the iPhone, Distimo's analysis shows that if the Android Market continues its upward trajectory, it will surpass Apple in as little as three months.

JD Power: Battery, hybrid-electric cars are overhyped

Plug-in electric and hybrid electric cars are over-hyped and won’t meet sales targets that many organizations are setting by 2020,according to global marketing information firm JD Power & Associates.

Battery-powered and hybrid-electric cars will only capture around  7.3 percent of all car sales by 2020, according to the firm. That means that electric car sales will only account for 5.2 million sales out of 70.9 million cars sold that year. Concerns about electric car looks, design, power and range were the largest holdout points for customers considering electric cars over internal-combustion vehicles.

Angry Birds hits 140M downloads, poised for growth in China

Rovio’s Angry Birds mobile game has been downloaded more than 140 million times since its release 16 months ago.

The game maker said it has seen a major surge from the 100 million units it reported in March, which means that the title is climbing higher in the ranks of the best-selling games of all time.

Apple blames bugs for iPhone tracking scandal, software fix coming soon

Apple finally has officially responded to reports that iPhones store user location data in the form of an unusually revealing Q&A.

The company says it’s not actuallytracking iPhone locations, instead it’s been compiling a crowdsourced database of cell tower and WiFi hotspot locations — “some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone,” Apple stresses — to speed up GPS services on the iPhones. Apple says it’s simply a bug that some users have found large amounts of this data on their computers — something that blogger John Gruber previously hinted at.

OpenFeint debuts mobile social game platform in China

OpenFeint's mobile social gaming platform is now available to Chinese gamers thanks to a partnership with Chinese online game maker The9.

Branded as The9 Game Zone, the platform lets Android mobile gamers socialize with each other, player multiplayer games, and share games. The move is an important one for OpenFeint as it tries to establish its platform on a global basis. This kind of international move is one reason Japan’s Gree agreed to buy OpenFeint last week for $104 million. It also shows that China is becoming a battleground for mobile game ecosystem players.

The cost of Sony’s PlayStation Network outage: $24 billion or $20 million?

Now that Sony has figured out thathackers stole personal records for more than 77 million PlayStation Network users, everyone wants to figure out how much the incident has cost the Japanese company.

The estimates today range from $20 million in lost revenues for a couple of weeks to $24 billion for the full costs of dealing with the consequences of losing control of customer data.

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan, estimates that Sony makes about $500 million in annual revenue from PSN sales of downloadable games, movies, music etc. So that comes out to about $10 million per week, with a 30 percent profit margin. Over two weeks of an outage (Sony said it would be down for another week as the system is rebuilt), Sony will likely lose about $20 million in revenue and $6 million in lost profit.

Sony faces class action lawsuit on PlayStation Network breach - Crash

Sony hasn’t yet recovered from thePlayStation Network outage, but it has already been hit with a  class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of an angry user. The suit comes a day after Sony admitted that personal information, including credit card data, had been compromised when hackers broke into its online entertainment service.

The PlayStation Network has more than 77 million registered users, and the data breach is one of the worst in hacking history. Sony said an external attack compromised user information, including names, addresses, birthdays, login passwords, and possibly credit card information.

Amazon says some data unrecoverable after restoring cloud service - Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon said that about 0.07 percent of the data storage in its restored eastern cloud service isn’t fully recoverable. The company’scloud-based web services suffered an outagethat lasted for three-and-a-half days last week and service was restored for the most part on Monday.

But some of the data — 0.07 percent of the eastern region — hasn’t been recovered, and the company is contacting the limited number of customers who have lost data. One of the lessons being learned here is that backup sometimes isn’t enough, and customers who use web services may have to use multiple cloud vendors in the future.

Nokia cuts 4,000 jobs worldwide, reorganizes R&D sites

Nokia announced today that it will cut its workforce by 4,000 employees by the end of year 2012. The majority of the reductions will be made in Nokia’s home country Finland, Denmark and in the UK. Nokia will also refocus its research and development operations.

The cuts are a part of Nokia’s restructuring as the company decided to switch from Symbian to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone operating system, a deal led by new CEO Stephen Elop (pictured left).

Nokia also announced a collaboration with Accenture. With the collaboration all Nokia’s Symbian software activities and about 3,000 jobs will transfer to Accenture by the end of year 2012. Nokia’s Finnish employees have estimated that about half of the 3 000 jobs going to Accenture will be from Finland, reported Helsingin Sanomat, the largest newspaper in Finland. (Beware, the story behind the link is in Finnish)

Verizon says its working to fix massive 4G LTE outage

Verizon Wireless subscribers on the carrier’s super fast LTE 4G network are now paying the price for being early adopters, as many users have been reporting sporadic 4G outages across the country.

In a statement released a few hours ago, Verizon said it has discovered the cause of the issue — which began last night and has persisted throughout Wednesday — and is working to resolve the outage.

Magnet Systems snags $12.6M from Andreessen Horowitz as social enterprise booms

Social enterprise network startup Magnet Systemsannounced today that it has pulled in $12.6 million in a first round of institutional funding. The round was led by well-know tech venture capital outfit Andreessen Horowitz.

The company said it will use the money to “fight for the best people possible” to help it develop a platform for creating business applications with attributes like those of social networks like Facebook.

Palo Alto, Calf.-based Magnet was founded by Alfred Chuang in 2008 and currently has 17 employees. The company said it aims to make the public cloud less of a conundrum for companies worried about the securityof how their information is stored.

Chuang, a former Sun Microsystems engineer who was also the CEO and “A” in former software startup BEA Systems before it was snapped up by Oracle in 2008 for $8.5 billion, says Magnet’s key technology is a platform dubbed the Workplace Interaction Network (WIN).

China’s tech gurus pick hottest early-stage startups

The Great Wall Club is an exclusive club made up of Chinese internet and technology CEOs. At its annual Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing, China today, the club named the winners of its G-Start Up competition, in which some 20 seed and early-stage startups delivered 5 t0 6-minute pitches in the hopes of snagging a spot in an incubator program.

Up for grabs were four months of incubation and funding at Chinaccelerator in Liaoning, three months with Innovation Works’ Jump Start Program in Beijing, and three months with the Plug and Play Startup Acceleration Program in Silicon Valley. The competitors were a combination of global and local startups that Chinese venture capitalists were interested in talking to about their potential in the Chinese market. You can find a full list of participating startups at the competition web site.

Dozens of tornadoes kill 194 in 5 Southern states

PLEASANT GROVE, Ala. – Dozens of tornadoes spawned by a powerful storm system wiped out entire towns across a wide swath of the South, killing at least 194 people, and officials said Thursday they expect the death toll to rise.

Alabama's state emergency management agency said it had confirmed 128 deaths, while there were 32 in Mississippi, 15 in Tennessee, 11 in Georgia and eight in Virginia.

The National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., said it received 137 tornado reports around the regions into Wednesday night.

Native Google Docs Android app could be a game changer

Google has released a slick new Android applicationfor Google Docs that makes managing documents easier and adds the ability to convert images into text.

Editing documents is still done exclusively on the web, but the added functionality provided by the native Android app greatly improves the user experience of Google Docs on mobile devices.

Google also acknowledges that documents are meant to be shared and thus has added support for widgets that access stored contacts easier. It’s these kinds of improvements could reasonably lure people away from using traditional office suite software.

YouTube founders acquire Delicious, announce (and crash) new startup

It looks like social bookmarking site Deliciouswill have a healthy afterlife. Yahoo, which acquired the site in 2005, just announced that Delicious has been sold to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

Hurley and Chen are apparently incorporating Delicious into a new startup called Avos. They aren’t revealing much about what Avos will be, but a press release says that they’re trying to “develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload.”

B2Bs need to increase their social intelligence

Social technologies are breeding a new type of savvy marketing pro, tasked with reaching a more fragmented audience of customers, prospects and brand influencers than ever before. While B2C marketers have started to significantly crack the code, established B2B companies (as well as start-ups in the space) still have to catch up and embrace the “world of social” and reach their customers through channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

For many start-ups and young companies, the real-time buyer information that is shared and accessible across social channels – aka social intelligence – is the “golden ticket.” This data source delivers valuable insight about what customers want and need, but may not explicitly state as such, in their personal or business lives.

Deeper understanding of customer requirements not only helps sell existing products and services, but also provides a new perspective into industry voids for start-ups to further develop products and differentiate from the (often more established) competition.

Minecraft creator opens the doors to custom mods

Indie darling Minecraft creator Marcus Persson will reveal the game’s guts to game developers looking to create custom modifications for the build-your-own-adventure sandbox game.

Minecraft is an important independent game because it is so wildly successful and it was released without a publisher. The game has sold more than 1 million copies and raked in some serious cash for Persson, who goes by his online handle “notch,” and the rest of his team. It’s always been about player-created content, but now the game is going even further than that to promote its development community.

Did Apple spend $4.5 million to name its cloud storage service iCloud?

Apple may have purchased the domain iCloud.com from Sweden-based company Xcerion for a reported $4.5 million, according to GigaOM.

If the news is true, iCloud could be the name Apple has given to its yet to be launched cloud-based media storage service, which will allow iTunes customers to access songs and videos remotely via the internet.

Apple is rushing to launch its service with licensing agreements from the four major music record labels before rivals Google and Amazon. If the company hadn’t already secured the name of its service, it would be a priority near the top of the list. So, the timing of this domain purchase would make sense.

Previously, iCloud was the name of Xcerion’s remote desktop service that was recently rebranded as CloudMe. The company registered Cloudme.com April 5, which is where the iCloud domain is currently redirecting to.

The Whois record for iCloud still lists Xcerion as the registrar, but this will presumably change if a sale to Apple did indeed occur.

I sure hope the iPhone 5 looks like this

Pictured here is the latest mockup of Apple’s next iPhone, taking into account a slew of new and old rumors, put together by ex-Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky over at his interim online home.

If the iPhone 5 ends up looking close to this mockup design, Apple may just lock me in for another cellphone cycle (which in gadget blogger terms is between a year and 18 months).

At first glance, you’ll notice a larger screen that reaches the edge of the device (the iPhone 4’s bezel instantly looks more unattractive after looking at this picture), a slightly tapered back, and a larger home button. Topolsky says that despite current rumors that the iPhone 5 won’t be a major redesign over the iPhone 4, he’s been hearing differently for months. His sources say that the next iPhone more closely resembles the super-thin iPod Touch and will have a “teardrop” shape (similar to the curves on Google’s Nexus S).

Darpa Wants Warbases Crackling with Stored Energy

Usually when the Pentagon’s far-out research branch thinks about energy, it comes up with ideas like, oh, putting miniature nuclear reactors on forward operating bases. But on Friday, Darpa buttoned its collar up tightly and asked its industry partners to come up with innovative ways to conserve energy in warzones.

The Deployed Energy Storage program calls for “Flexible / robust energy storage systems,” to cut down on the amount of fuel that the military burns through to operate out at its remote wartime bases. The need is obvious. Not only is fuel expensive, transportation convoys to get fuel to the bases are frequent targets for insurgents.

Origin Begins to Sell World's Highest-Performing Notebook.

Origin Initiates Shipments of Laptop with 4.50GHz Processor, GeForce GTX 485M

rigin, a maker of  luxurious high-performance personal computers, on Wednesday started to sell what may easily be the world's highest-performing desktop replacement (DTR) notebook on the planet. The Origin Eon17-S notebook integrates quad-core Intel microprocessor that can operate at whopping 4.50GHz as well as Nvidia Corp.'s recently launched GeForce GTX 485M.

Google and Apple: Smartphone Spies

They know where you texted last summer and where you ate last night, thanks to location data on your smartphone. Who else are Google and Apple sharing your data with?

Today's smartphones are amazing devices. They let you check your email, surf the Web, watch YouTube, make video calls, or play Angry Birds from virtually anywhere. You can use one to find a four-star Italian restaurant within three blocks of your current location that's offering a 20 percent discount if you place an order in the next 30 minutes.

Sometimes, when the wind is right and a cell tower is within visible range, they even let you make calls.

Sega Bombs, Magnet Mines: Terror Tech from WikiLeaks’ Gitmo Files

Remember this the next time you plug in your Sega Genesis for some throwback gameplay: al-Qaida once wanted to set off bombs concealed in your game cartridges.

That’s just one of the baroque examples of the terror group’s experimental techniques in mayhem. More than 90 documents relating to detainees at Guantanamo Bay disclosed by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks detail several others. Allegedly, al-Qaida had a nuclear bomb as early 2004. It wanted to use magnets to set mines on U.S. Navy ships. And it thought altimeter watches would make good detonators.

AG wants answers on tracking from Apple, Google

Citing a need to protect consumers' personal information online, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is calling for a meeting with executives from Apple and Google to get more details on what the companies are doing with location information collected from consumer devices.

In a statement posted to Madigan's site and picked up by Reuters, letters from Madigan have been sent to both companies asking about what data is being kept and for how long. The attorney general also seeks to find out what that data is being used for.

Mobile dev momentum "shifting back" to Apple

A new survey concludes that developer momentum is shifting away from Android and back towards Apple.

The survey - conducted by Appcelerator and IDC - blames fragmentation and tepid interest in currentAndroid tablets for "chipping away" at Google's recent momentum gains.

To be sure, interest in Android seems to have "plateaued" as concerns about fragmentation and disappointing results from early tablet sales cause developers to "pull back" from their previous steadily increasing enthusiasm for Google's mobile operating system.

"While this opens the door a crack for new entrants, nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that it is not possible for Microsoft, RIM, HP, and Nokia to reverse momentum relative to Apple and Google," the report stated.