Do you really want to know if you're likely to get a horrible disease? That's one of the questions posed in this new episode, which looks at developments in personal genetic profiling, which can predict a ...

Here's who's on the late night shows tonight. Charlie Rose: Naguib Sawiris The Colbert Report: Kenneth R. Miller The Late Show with David Letterman: Adam Sandler, Scott Dixon, and Donna Summer Jay Leno: Mike ...

The Northwest Maritime Center will celebrate the start of construction of two buildings with songs of the sea, speeches from the powerful, and gratitude all around during a "Port Townsend style celebration" on ...

Nova ScienceNow, 9 p.m., Channels 48, 16. How much can science do? Can it determine which Van Gogh painting is a fake? Predict our health future via DNA? Create an artificial tree, pulling carbon dioxide from ...

Guys love to break things, burn them and blow them up. David Letterman has been milking that truism for years with his silly clips, and the series "Mythbusters" has coasted to cable success on the same notion.

When it rose in popularity between the Jazz Age and the advent of rock 'n' roll, big band music was aided by dovetailing nicely with the movies being made at the time.

Cory Davila tries to cultivate parenting skills with a borrowed infant in "The Baby Borrowers." SPOTLIGHT 'The Baby Borrowers' 8 p.m. on NBC The teen couples continue to struggle with their borrowed infants as ...

Today is Monday, July 7, the 189th day of 2008 with 177 to follow. The moon is waxing.

People magazine paid a reported $4 million to release the first photos of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt in June 2007.

Forget the industrious beaver. Canadian businesses ought to look to the adaptable chameleon for a modern corporate model, a new book suggests.

An anonymous reader alerts us to new material up on Wikileaks: 208 scanned pages (in one PDF) relating to the Church of Scientology and its former "Office of Special Affairs" employee (and subsequent apostate) Frank Oliver. "The documents are dated between 1986 and 1992 inclusive, when, according to the file, Frank Oliver was declared a 'suppressive person' and excommunicated. Frank Oliver should be able to verify the material and has appeared in the media before on subjects relating to the church. Starting on page 107, the document shows that at the time of writing the Church of Scientology was still actively engaged in black propaganda (especially concerning psychiatry), 'fair game' and infiltration."

bdelacey writes "In January 2008, just in time for Ruby's 15th birthday, O'Reilly published The Ruby Programming Language. The co-authors make a strong writing team. Yukihiro (Matz) Matsumoto created Ruby. David Flanagan previously wrote Java In a Nutshell and JavaScript: The Definitive Guide — he has a CS degree from MIT with a concentration in writing. Drawings are the work of Rubyist-extraordinaire why the lucky stiff and technical reviewers include well known Rubyists David A. Black, Charles Oliver Nutter, and Shyouhei Urabe." Read on for the rest of Brian's review.

1up is republishing a short interview with BioWare's Casey Hudson, the Project Director for their sci-fi epic Mass Effect. The piece originally ran in EGM, and covers a few nagging details left behind by the project, things like "What happened to the ability to interrupt people?", or "What's up with the UI?". "Hudson: Well, the item comparison is probably a lot better than KOTOR's because we now show you a graph that compares [the stats] of one weapon to another. As you can imagine, the inventory-management system for a role-playing game is probably one of the biggest and most complicated systems. It's actually one of the drawbacks to giving people so much to do and so many things. We didn't get much negative feedback during development with the inventory screen, although [if stuff doesn't work right], that's definitely something we want to fix in the future." That's a really deft way of handling that question, but I have to say: despite my deep and abiding love for the game, the user interface is an affront to Tufte.

ninja_assault_kitten writes "There's an interesting rant from Oliver Rist up on the PC Magazine site. He compares the catastrophe that is Vista to the recently released OS X Leopard. While clearly one is a lion and the other a cub, there do appear to be some frustrating similarities. From the article: 'A month of using Leopard with the same software I had under Tiger and the OS has dumped six times. That's six cold reboots for Oliver. Apple isn't even honest enough to admit that Leopard is crashing: The OS just grays out my desktop and pops up a dialog box telling me I've got to reboot. Like the whole thing is my fault. I even snapped a picture of it. After all, I HAD PLENTY OF CHANCES!'"

Dean Takahashi, of the San Jose Mercury News, has up a lengthy interview with Mass Effect project director Casey Hudson on the almost four-year-long development of the title. The two men go into some detail on BioWare's approach to game creation, as well as discussing the numerous technical and storytelling leaps they made with the game. "Hudson said, 'One thing I'm hoping people see in it is how much more there is for a player to make decisions on. It makes it really hard for us to develop, given the customization that we make possible in the game. For example, from the beginning, you are not pre-made as a character. You can play Commander Shepard. But you can also create your own character, male or female. You can choose your special abilities. Those are ways to make your game different and unique. These are things that make it much harder for us to make the game so that it is consistent all the way through, given your choices.'"

Stitch_Surfs writes "Blognation is reporting that the IM client FriendVOX has gone live for Facebook. This is the first time that Facebook users (of which there are now some 32 million) can communicate with one another from directly within the Facebook application. This development, by UK-based Techlightenment, effectively closes the loop for any external applications to be used (or necessary) for communication among Facebook users.'It will be interesting to see how quickly FriendVox is adopted and could it ever replace Twitter by simply using the Facebook status. The other question is what will Facebook do if FriendVox ever became too popular? Would they seek to buy it or replicate it themselves? This is the real dilemma facing all Facebook developers living inside the Facebook walled garden, and recently this happened when a developer showed Facebook their new marketplace application which would run inside of Facebook. Inside of two weeks Facebook had suddenly launched their own marketplace!'"

willith writes "James Oliver Rigney Jr, author of the long-running fantasy series The Wheel of Time and better known to millions of fans by the pen name Robert Jordan, died on 16 Sept 2007 from cardiac amyloidosis. Jordan announced he had been diagnosed with the disease in March 2006 and vowed to beat the odds, but determination and gumption sometimes just aren't enough in the face of a disease with a median survival time of just over two years. Jordan was in the process of writing the twelfth and final book in the Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light, but the book was not slated for release until 2009 and is still incomplete. While there is hope that the book will still be finished from Jordan's notes, this is devastating news to all of us who have been reading the series since 1990."

An anonymous reader writes to alert us to a court win for the EFF in two cases in which DirecTV employed heavy-handed legal tactics to suppress security and computer science research into satellite and smart card technology. Here's the ruling (PDF) from the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. From the announcement: "The cases, DirecTV v. Huynh and DirecTV v. Oliver, involved a provision of federal law prohibiting the 'assembly' or 'modification' of equipment designed to intercept satellite signals. DirecTV maintained that the provision should cover anyone who works with equipment designed for interception of their signals, regardless of their motivation or whether any interception occurs. But in a hearing earlier this year, EFF argued that the provision should apply only to entities that facilitate illegal interception by other people and not to those who simply tinker or use the equipment, such as researchers and others working to further scientific knowledge of the devices at issue."

The Computer and Videogames site touched base with Nintendo in the wake of an interview with a game company in Game Informer magazine, to check up on their plans for original content on the Wii. A marketing director from Hudson Entertainment stated in GI that the Wii would feature a new games channel for downloadable games, and CVG wanted to follow up on the claim. Nintendo's response was that while they haven't decided on the specific method by which they'll be offering the games online, downloadable original content is definitely in the cards for the console's future. No timeframe was given for this content, but it is reassuring to have this piece of the Wii puzzle reaffirmed by the company.

kog777 writes to note a story in International Business Times about "net metering," or generating your own power without disconnecting from the grid. Forty states have laws allowing individuals to do this, and many of them offer subsidies and tax breaks for people who do. From the article: "When the sun shines bright on their home in New York's Hudson Valley, John and Anna Bagnall live out a homeowner's fantasy. Their electricity meter runs backward. Solar panels on their barn roof can often provide enough for all their electricity needs. Sometimes — and this is the best part — their solar setup actually pushes power back into the system."