Christian Science Monitor

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The holiday smartphone forecast is getting gusty. Last month the "Google phone" – T-Mobile's G1 – arrived. Before that came Sprint's Instinct and Apple's iPhone 3G for AT&T. On Friday, Research In Motion and Verizon will begin selling the BlackBerry Storm for $199 with a two-year contract. The reviews ...

At an ice-cream booth, Patrick Buckley dished out ice cream to attendees of Maker Faire, a do-it-yourself festival held earlier this month in Austin, Texas. With flavors such as frozen mint cucumber lime and BBQ honey, the treats were far from traditional. Nor were they handchurned the old-fashioned way, with ...

Malcolm Gladwell's third book, "Outliers," hit stores yesterday – and it's pretty darn good. The author, most famous for "The Tipping Point," has become an expert at finding patterns in innovation, choice, opportunity, and success. He's clearly using all four of them to his advantage. Gladwell tackles social-science conundrums and psychological ...

The microblogging site Twitter has become hugely popular in the social sphere by inviting users to answer the simple question: “What are you doing?” Now, several new microblogging tools for the workplace are posing a variant on the question: “What are you working on?” If that sounds like a Big Brother ...

Few organizations have image archives that rival Life magazine's. With millions of images from 1750s to today, the massive trove contains everything from President Monroe, to Marilyn Monroe, to diners eating roe. Thanks to Google, the Life archive is now my new favorite time drain. The two joined forces to index ...

Eager downloaders hoping to catch an earful of Google searches on their iPhones this weekend heard nothing but crickets. A media storm heralded the coming of an application that would translate search terms spoken into iPhones on the fly and return results in seconds, but launch day, Friday, came and ...

The One Laptop Per Child project, whose goal was to create a low cost computer to foster learning for children in developing countries, has restarted its "Give 1, Get 1" scheme. The plan, which allows people to purchase one of the iconic green laptops for themselves and donate another to ...

Our regular roundup of sci-tech stories from across the Web includes: How Facebook aided a protest in Saudi Arabia, a great online sci-fi short, and World of Warcraft (home to 10 million subscribers) unlocks a massive new chapter. Let’s kick it off: Profile: Geek Pop Star "Malcolm Gladwell’s elegant and wildly popular ...

Computer features constantly make leaps and bounds. Laptop sizes shrink. Processing speeds double. Hard-disk capacities triple. So how come we never hear about significant strides in battery life? The truth is, the batteries that come with portable PCs nowadays are huge improvements over their predecessors. But these gains are often invisible. ...

In the hunt for solar systems beyond our own, astronomers have crossed an important threshold – capturing from the ground, as well as from space, the first direct images of planets around bright, sun-like stars. Since September, three teams say they have imaged planet-candidates. The most recent reports, published in Thursday’s ...

The orbiting electricians have nearly finished their work on the International Space Station. Now it’s time for the plumbers. The space shuttle Endeavour and its seven-member crew are set to launch early Friday evening for a 15-day mission to the orbiting outpost. Their assignment resembles an episode from the Home and ...

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After classes, Sally Peach, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a long list of to-dos. She wants to hit the gym, tackle school work, and, as captain of an intramural soccer team and member of a campus health advocacy program, she has plenty of e-mail to respond to ...

While on the campaign trail this fall, Senator John McCain would laugh at government-funded research on the DNA of bears. What would he think of the research on DNA from extinct cave bears that now has elucidated the bear family tree? It’s the latest example of how scientists are using ...

You’ve got a world-changing idea. And a passion to make it happen. That’s good. But you need a third element: The ability to “pitch” your idea to venture capitalists and others who can help turn your dream into reality. Budding business tycoons or Hollywood script writers know the importance of marketing themselves ...

Prepaid gift cards – long considered the ultimate cop-out present – are getting a little more interesting this year. A new line of Best Buy gift cards come with built-in speakers. This is not a buy-this-get-that deal – the card itself doubles as a mini boombox. A plug attached to the ...

When Tien Tzuo founded an online billing company called Zuora last spring, he had his head in the clouds. Mr. Tzuo didn’t buy any powerful computers to store data. That meant he didn’t have to hire computer experts to keep them running. He didn’t even buy software like Microsoft’s Office for ...

After home heating oil prices surged last winter, Meghan Kaiserman decided this fall to get ahead of any price spike and go thermal – that is, she chose to get a thermal-imaging home-energy audit. So, on a recent chilly morning, Ms. Kaiserman and thermal-energy auditor David Valley walked through her large ...

Our regular roundup of sci-tech stories from across the Web focuses on the next four years. Let’s kick it off: Platform: What Obama's win means for science "Nature takes a look at some of the races — from Congressional competitions to state-wide ballot initiatives — that will affect the nation's research." [via ...