A beautiful screen, a weak battery, a door to the future: Ars reviews the Nintendo 3DS – “I want to be shown something new when I play a fresh gaming system, something that wouldn’t be possible on the hardware I already have in my home. The first time I was able to go hands-on with the 3DS and experience a working 3D technology that didn’t require glasses, I knew that Nintendo was onto something big….” See also: FiveThings You Need to Know About the Nintendo 3DS

How Amazon will lead the way to cheaper tablets – “By busting up the Open Handset Alliance with its Appstore, Amazon will make cheaper Android tablets more desirable and perhaps cut Google out of the loop…”

Tablet comparison chart

It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know – “In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin. Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”..”

Google starts testing Google Music internally – “Google Music, a streaming service that users would be able to access from Internet-connected devices, is close to being ready but is being held up by a lack of content. Google managers told counterparts at the top four record companies last year that they hoped everything would be in place for a launch by late 2010. More recently, Google tentatively planned to demonstrate the service earlier this month at the South By Southwest conference. Neither ended up happening as Google Music keeps getting pushed back, although technically it still hasn’t been officially announced….” See also: Larry Page already cracking the whip at Google, a week before he takes the reins

Need Proof That Not All 4G Is the Same? Here It Is. – “Ever since Sprint launched its Evo with WiMAX last year, calling it the nation’s first 4G phone, competing operators have scrambled to use the 4G moniker for their own devices and services. T-Mobile soon began touting that its HSPA+ network upgrades would bring “4G-like speeds” and now simply uses the 4G tag for phones that have 14 Mbps or better radios. AT&T is currently in the process of similar HSPA+ upgrade and has used 4G in the name of recent handsets, such as the Motorola Atrix 4G and HTC Inspire 4G. And in December, Verizon launched its own 4G network upgrade in the form of LTE, which is different from HSPA+ and WiMAX….”

How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives – “Fifteen million iPads were sold last year. As iPad 2 launches, Charles Arthur looks at the impact of tablet computers on the way we relate to technology, and five users tell us about how the iPad is feeding into the way they work…”

133 US cities now have their own broadband networks – “If you want 100Mbps symmetrical broadband—which offers the same upload and download speeds—and you live in the state of North Carolina, you have only one choice: a city-owned broadband provider. The city of Wilson’s “Greenlight” ISP recently bragged about signing up “North Carolina’s first homeowners” with the service, which costs $150 a month if packaged with other services….”

Porsche 918 Spyder Hybrid Comes To Market – “With a 500-plus horsepower 4.0 litre V8 engine, and two electric motors with 218 horsepower, the sports car is an all-wheel drive vehicle that can go from 0 to 60 in 3.1 seconds, with a top speed of 199 miles per hour. According to the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC), the 918 Spyder consumes 3.0L/110km of fuel, or less than 1 gallon of gas per roughly 70 miles. Official EPA fuel economy data is expected just before the car arrives to U.S. customers….”

EVE: A Future Vision

A look back at the history of the future of cars – “For those of us who grew up in the ’80s, there’s one catchphrase that defined our hopes and expectations for what the automobile could be like in that far, far distant future when we became as old as Marty McFly’s parents: “where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” But here we are in 2011, facing our forties, and we still need roads. The steering wheel is another matter. Indeed, if there’s any component of the car as we know it that’s about to be go unneeded thanks to technological innovation, it’s the driver….”

Robots Arrive at Fukushima Nuclear Site with Unclear Mission – “As workers race to stave off further melting at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan, several robots there are waiting on the sidelines for an opportunity to help. Questions remain, however, regarding how these units might assist in an ongoing emergency at a site contaminated with radiation and deluged with tons of corrosive seawater….”

Tools of Tradecraft: More Spy Gear From the CIA, Others – “We’ve expanded the rogue’s gallery of ingenious spy gadgets with a raft of devious tricks from the former Soviet bloc and other countries, including a lipstick gun, shoe bug and a seriously savage rectal Houdini kit (you’ll understand it when you see the pic). We hope you like these as much as you liked the others. All images are courtesy of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C…”

Firefox 4 vs. Chrome 11 vs. Internet Explorer 9 JavaScript Benchmarks – “I ran these on my Acer Aspire 5734Z-4836. It’s on Windows 7 Home Premium and has 3 GB RAM and a 2.3 GHz Pentium Dual Core processor. I tested Chrome 11 (Latest Update) against Firefox 4 (final version) and Internet Explorer 9 (Final Version) using Google’s JavaScript Benchmark Suite. These are the results….”

The 8,000-year-old climate puzzle – “Scientists have come up with new evidence in support of the controversial idea that humanity’s influence on climate began not during the industrial revolution, but thousands of years ago. Proposed by palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman in 2003, the theory says that human influences offset the imminent plunge into another ice age and helped create the relatively stable climate that we are familiar with today. It has been repeatedly panned as implausible by palaeoclimate researchers, but eight years on, Ruddiman and others say that they have the data to support early anthropogenic climate change….”

A brief history of time zones

Scientists to Drill Earth’s Mantle, Retrieve First Sample? – “Scientists are planning to drill all the way through the planet’s miles-thick crust to Earth’s deep, hot mantle and retrieve samples for the first time. The samples, they say, would rival moon rocks for sheer scientific import—and be nearly as hard to get….”

Scientists plan to drill all the way down to the Earth’s mantle – “In what can only be described as a mammoth undertaking, scientists, led by British co-chiefs, Dr Damon Teagle of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, England and Dr Benoit Ildefonse from Montpellier University in France, have announced jointly in an article in Nature that they intend to drill a hole through the Earth’s crust and into the mantle; a feat never before accomplished, much less seriously attempted….”

“Mirrors in Our Brain” -Do They Do for Psychology What DNA Did for Biology? – “6a00d8341bf7f753ef013488fc3f6f970c A recent paradigm-shattering discovery in neuroscience shows how our minds share actions, emotions, and experience what we commonly call “the monkey see, monkey do” experience. When we see someone laugh, cry, show disgust, or experience pain, in some sense, we share that emotion. When we see someone in distress, we share that distress. When we see a great actor, musician or sportsperson perform at the peak of their abilities, it can feel like we are experiencing just something of what they are experiencing….”

Protection from the cure. – “So what problems does radiation therapy cause? For lung cancer patients the problems arise in the oesophagus (the food pipe down to the stomach). The oxidants produced by the effects of the radiation must be akin to having your gullet weep bleach. This leads to problems such as severe inflammation and sometimes leads to ulceration. This can cause patients so much pain when they swallow that they are given pain relief with narcotics, or they have to have a break from the therapy….”

Equation: How Much Money Do Spammers Rake In? – “After deleting the 10,000th Viagra offer from your inbox, you might wonder, does anyone actually make money off this crap? Chris Kanich and his colleagues at UC San Diego and the International Computer Science Institute wondered too—so they hijacked a botnet to find out. Kanich’s team intentionally infected eight computers with a middleman virus, software they found in the wild that was relaying instructions between a botmaster computer and the network of computers it had secretly turned into spam-sending zombies. Then they changed the orders, effectively zombifying the botnet for their own research. Instead of sending hapless rubes to the botmaster’s website, spam ads would instead funnel them to a site built by Kanich’s team. It looked like an authentic Internet pharmacy, but instead of taking credit card numbers in return for a bottle of sugar pills (or worse), the site coughed up an error message and counted the clicks. Then the researchers calculated an estimate of how much money the spammer grossed per day: about $7,000. Here’s the equation they used to generate that number….”

Spammers sought after botnet takedown – “The Rustock botnet, which sent up to 30 billion spam messages per day, might have been run by two or three people….”

Scientists Find Evidence of New Phase of Matter in Superconductor “Pseudogap” – “Scientists are working hard to find ways to make superconductors operate at much warmer temperatures, but certain unanswered questions have been standing in their way for decades. One of the most pressing unanswered questions is called the “pseudogap.” The quest to understand the pseudogap and determine if it helps or harms superconductivity is a key area of research for scientists all around the world…”

In Iran, new attack escalates ongoing cyberconflict – “A cyber-attack linked to Iran this week is the latest in a string of cyber-events that some say represents a new step in a shadowy and long-running war between the Iranian government and those who criticize it on the Internet…”

Viewpoint: We should stop running away from radiation – “More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese tsunami and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died – and is unlikely to….”

New data mined from historic ‘primordial soup’ study – “Stanley Miller’s famous 1953 experiment attempted to recreate the organic molecules of a young Earth. He discovered more than he realized, researchers say….”

Academic fury over order to study the big society – “The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) will spend a “significant” amount of its funding on the prime minister’s vision for the country, after a government “clarification” of the Haldane principle – a convention that for 90 years has protected the right of academics to decide where research funds should be spent….”

Beetle turns itself into a wheel (that’s how it rolls) – “The beaches are home to the beautiful coastal tiger beetle (Cicindela dorsalis media). Tiger beetles are among the fastest of insect runners, but their larvae are slow and worm-like. If they’re exposed and threatened, running isn’t an option. Instead, they turn themselves into living wheels. They leap into the air, coil their bodies into a loop, and hit the ground spinning. The wind carries them to safety….”

Solar powered cell phone film – Bye, bye big batteries and so long outlets – “Few things in this world can be more annoying than running out of battery. It seems like your cell phone has made the application of Murphy’s Law its raison d’etre. It dies right before you are expecting that important call from a client. It dies the day that your kids are sick. It always seems to die when you have just left the spot that had an easily accessible outlet….”

The Great Language Land Grab – “Microsoft is suing Apple, and Apple is suing Amazon, all over the right to use a simple two-word phrase: “app store.” Apple got there first, introducing its App Store in July 2008 as a marketplace for mobile applications. In January, Microsoft disputed Apple’s trademark claim, arguing that “app store” had already become a generic expression. And last week, Amazon announced its own “Appstore” for Google’s Android devices, prompting an infringement suit from Apple….”

Should Lying Be Illegal? Canada’s Broadcasters Debate – “Honesty seems like such a no-brainer of a requirement. But it’s caused a great deal of controversy in Canada over the past few weeks–controversy heightened by the upcoming launch of a new, politically conservative Canadian television channel called Sun TV….”

Losing Our Way – “So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home….” See also: Thousands fill London streets in protest at spending cuts

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