Matt's Favorites: Super Bowl Memes And Tweets, Apple Vs.Samsung, Us Vs. Neanderthals
And what, you ask, are the latest coolest things in the magnificent world of tech? Well, have a seat and check out these gems...
* The Ravens won, the 49ers lost and Beyonce swayed so hard the Superdome lights blew out. Super Bowl XLVII packed in the drama, making the game ripe for meme-ing.
* Oh, and in case you were wondering? Here are the answers to Amy Poehler's Super Bowl commercial questions.
* One last Super Bowl story: 24.1 million Super Bowl game tweets.
* A federal court turns down Apple's request to expedite its appeal versus Samsung.
* But Apple did win one Monday. Apple Inc and other online retailers did not break California law by requiring consumers to provide their address and phone numbers as a condition of accepting credit card payments, the state's high court ruled on Monday.
* New dating techniques show that Neanderthals may have died out earlier than currently believed. (Which gives me another chance to plug Canadian sci-fi writer Robert J. Sawyer's most excellent "Neanderthal Parallax," a trilogy of novels depicting the effects of the accidental opening of a portal to an alternate universe in which we died out and the Neanderthals survived -- and created a technological civilization, though one quite different from ours. Great fun. Go, read.)
* Windows insists that its Windows 8 operating system is off to a 'solid' start, and should se a sales boost soon from a raft of new hardware.
* Foxconn says it's going to boost participation in unions at its Chinese plants.
* Britain's lost King Richard III is lost no more.
* More on this week's close encounter with a 50-yard-wide asteroid. It wouldn't be anywhere near an extinction level event even if it hit, but it's still enough to make you think that maybe we ought to ensure the survival of the only known intelligent life in the universe by spreading ourselves out to a few other nearby planets and moons.
* It turns out that supersonic skydiver Fearless Felix Baumgartner fell even faster than originally estimated. Wow. And the video on the page is every bit as terrifying as it ever was.
* Speaking of aviation, check out these tiny helicopter drones. No toys, these.
* And in orbit, this tiny, three-foot Japanese satellite is visible because of bright LEDs and beams Morse code from space.
* It turns out that among the exoplanets, alien moons (like, say, the habitable-zone satellites of hot Jupiters close to their sons) may be easier to photograph than alien planets.
* And here's a new look at the habitable zone around stars. Turns out our Earth is rather on the inner edge of it, almost too hot.
* The FCC wants to blanket the country with free Wi-Fi. Cool. Well, unless you're invested in the current systems of paid Wi-Fi.
* And in military tech, Iran has unveiled a homemade fighter jet, which it says can evade radar.
* And these glasses may help fix color blindness. too.
