T-Mobile G2 (Google Ion) Review: Most Improved Award – “Not only does the T-Mobile G2/HTC Magic/Google Ion phone improve on original T-Mobile G1 in just about every way, it manages to do it while cutting down significantly on the size. The only thing it doesn’t have going for it is a hardware keyboard….”

University to use iPhone for attendance checks – “A Japanese university is giving away Apple Inc’s trendy iPhone to students for free, but with a catch: the device will be used to check their attendance…”

Intel touts 8-core Xeon monster Nehalem-EX – “Intel gave a demo yesterday of its eight-core (16 thread) , 2.3 billion-transistor Nehalem-EX, which is set to launch later this year…”

Hands On With Microsoft’s New Search Engine: Bing, But No Boom – “Microsoft’s new search engine Bing excels at finding a good restaurant. Unlike Google, which generally returns links to mere web sites, Bing crawls listings at review services like Yelp.com and CitySearch. It then summarizes the results and displays a scorecard for each, rating things like service, drinks, food, wait time, lunch offerings, and so on, all laid out in a neat comparative table…” See also: Microsoft Bing: Much better than expected

Early glimpse at Zune HD: “better” than iPod touch – “Just a day after it was introduced, the Zune HD has been demonstrated live and is already generating buzz from at least one major blog that it could provide an experience superior to Apple’s iPod touch…”

Zune HD Video Hands On from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Navy Tests Incredible Sci-Fi Weapon – “The U.S. Navy yesterday test fired an incredibly powerful new big gun designed to replace conventional weaponry aboard ships. Sci-fi fans will recognize its awesome power and futuristic technology…”

Navify Is An Interface For Viewing Wikipedia With Photo Galleries, Videos And Comments – “Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia has a wealth of textual information but no videos and hardly any pictures? Take the Wikipedia article for Sony’s Rolly, for example, where the device is depicted as “an egg-shaped digital robotic music player.” If you have never seen a Rolly before, this cryptic description won’t help much. After reading about it in Wikipedia, you’ll then need to look it up on YouTube or Google Image Search to see what it actually looks like…”

Vancouver engineer invents self-balancing unicycle – “There’s a blocky-looking thing under the saddle. And the rider isn’t pedaling, yet the contraption is moving. And the rider is playing a guitar…”

Exactly What is the New Sweetener Erythritol? – “water, vitamins, vitaminwater, coca-cola, coke, erythritol, artificial sweeteners, fructose, crystalline fructose, HFCSIf you look at the ingredients of VitaminWater 10 (owned by Coca Cola), you might be pleased to see that it contains the natural sweetener stevia. However, you will also notice that it is loaded with crystalline fructose, sucrose, and a mysterious product called Erythritol…”

Superconducting Chips To Become Reality – “Most chemical elements become superconducting at low temperatures or high pressures, but until now, copper, silver, gold, and the semiconductor germanium, for example, have all refused superconductivity. Scientists at the Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (FZD) research center were now able to produce superconducting germanium for the first time. Furthermore, they could unravel a few of the mysteries which come along with superconducting semiconductors…”

The History of the Integrated Circuit – “Our world is full of integrated circuits. You find several of them in computers. For example, most people have probably heard about the microprocessor. The microprocessor is an integrated circuit that processes all information in the computer. It keeps track of what keys are pressed and if the mouse has been moved. It counts numbers and runs programs, games and the operating system. Integrated circuits are also found in almost every modern electrical device such as cars, television sets, CD players, cellular phones, etc. But what is an integrated circuit and what is the history behind it?”

The Scrap Value of a Hacked PC – “Computer users often dismiss Internet security best practices because they find them inconvenient, or because they think the rules don’t apply to them. Many cling to the misguided belief that because they don’t bank or shop online, that bad guys won’t target them. The next time you hear this claim, please refer the misguided person to this blog post, which attempts to examine some of the more common — yet often overlooked — ways that cyber crooks can put your PC to criminal use…”

World’s largest solar telescope – “The world’s largest solar telescope, which can capture the Sun’s magnetic field better than other telescopes, is now operational…”

SATA 3.0 Released, Solid-State Drives Rejoice – “We’ve seen glimmers on the horizon for some time now, but the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has finally made official the third iteration of the serial ATA specification. SATA Revision 3.0 doubles the existing SATA 3Gb/s bandwidth to 6Gb/s, or roughly 600 MB/s, using a connector that’s fully backwards-compatible with the older specification. Device manufacturers (especially motherboards) won’t have to reinvent the wheel connection-wise, which should help the new specification reach full market acceptance in a short time frame…”

Dustbot the street cleaning robot – “What is believed to be the world’s first robot that comes to take away rubbish from your house when you want it to has been unveiled in Italy…”

Extending lifespan while shortening healthspan? – “One of the central precepts of biogerontology is that meaningful lifespan extension will be concomitant with extension of the “healthspan”, i.e., the vigorous part of life — life that is, for lack of a better phrase, worth living. ..”

U.S. Manga Obscenity Conviction Roils Comics World – “In an obscenity first, a U.S. comic book collector has pleaded guilty to importing and possessing Japanese manga books depicting illustrations of child sex abuse and bestiality…”

Science and Technology (S&T) Snapshots – “Technology to capture a disaster victim’s vital signs-from up to 40 feet away…”

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