Cody Taylor

Not everyone is getting the new feature yet, but the microblogging service has begun to display search and trends in its homepage toolbar.

You do not have to limit yourself to the Google search engine only. This time I am listing a few cool FireFox addons that show you more relevant information based on your search query and provides you with more opportunities to browse through.

And, unlike solid state disk, this energy-efficient drive only costs 9.

Shutter is a user-friendly app to take screenshots (of a window, fullscreen, a custom selection or even a site), edit them (apply a plugin effect, draw directly, or use an external editor like GIMP) and upload! + more features inside.

nizcolas writes “Notable evolutionary biologist, author, and speaker Richard Dawkins was recently invited to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma as part of the school’s celebration of Charles Darwin. However, Oklahoma lawmakers are working to silence Dawkins with the passage of House Bill 1015 (RTF), which reads in part: ‘… the University of Oklahoma … has invited as a public speaker on campus, Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published opinions, as represented in his 2006 book “The God Delusion,” and public statements on the theory of evolution demonstrate an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking and are views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma …'” Pending legal action, Dawkins is set to speak tonight at 7 pm. (Luckily, we no longer live in the era of Bertrand Russell’s court-ordered dismissal on moral grounds from the College of the City of New York.) And reader thms sends word of the Vatican’s Darwin conference (program): “The conference, marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origin of Species,” has been criticized by advocates of Creationism or Intelligent Design for not inviting them. The Muslim creationist Harun Yahya, most famous for his Atlas of Creation, also complained about not being invited.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Al notes a story in Technology Review reporting on a CMU study (now over a month old) claiming that the Volt doesn’t make economic sense, and GM’s response (PDF). The study suggests that hybrids with large batteries offering up to 40 miles of range before an on-board generator kicks in simply cost too much for the gas savings to work out. Al writes: “Unsurprisingly, GM disputes the claims, saying ‘Our battery team is already starting work on new concepts that will further decrease the cost of the Volt battery pack quite substantially in a second-generation Volt pack.’ Interestingly, however, GM admits that the tax credits for plug-in hybrids will be crucial to making the volt successful. Without those credits, would an electric vehicle like the Volt be viable?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panzor writes “NASA is running a contest to name the new addition to the space station, Node 3. The polls are open until March 20. The selection that is getting the most votes is ‘Suggest your own,’ and the leading name besides the official four (Earthrise, Legacy, Serenity, and Venture) is ‘Colbert.’ Comedian Stephen Colbert suggested on the air that fans write in his name. On March 5th, his vote count passed that of Xenu and Colbert pronounced himself Scientology’s ‘Galactic Overlord.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amerika sends in a Wired blog post on the desire in Congress to make data on lawmaking more easily available to the public. The senator who introduced the language into an omnibus appropriations bill wants feedback on the best way to make (e.g.) the Library of Congress’s Thomas data more available — an API or bulk downloads, or both. Some comments on the blog posting call for an authenticated versioning system so we can know unequivocally how any particular language made its way into a bill. “Congress has apparently listened to the public’s complaints about lack of convenient access to government data. The new Omnibus Appropriations Bill includes a section, introduced by Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), that would mark the first tangible move toward making federal legislative data available to the public in bulk, so third parties can mash it up and redistribute it in innovative and accessible ways. This would include all the data currently distributed through the Library of Congress’s Thomas web site — bill status and summary information, lists of sponsors, tracking timelines, voting records, etc.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KentuckyFC writes “Place two conducting parallel plates a few nanometres apart and the well-known but difficult-to-measure Casimir force will push them together. The force depends crucially on the shape of the plates but nobody is exactly sure how. That’s because calculations with anything other than flat plates are fiendishly difficult and measurements are even harder. Now a group at MIT has come up with an ingenious new way to investigate Casimir forces. What the team has noticed is a mathematical analogy between the Casimir force acting on microscopic bodies in a vacuum and the electromagnetic behavior of macroscopic bodies floating in a conducting fluid. Their idea is to build a centimeter-scale metal model of the system they want to investigate, place it in salt water, and bombard it with microwaves and see what happens. The team says the experiment does not measure the force on the scale model but instead a quantity that is mathematically related to the force. So the experiment is not a simulator but actually an analog computer that calculates the force (abstract). What’s exciting is that the method should for the first time give researchers a way of testing nano-machines designed to exploit the Casimir force.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using these tools you’ll be able to better keep track of your conversations, visualize data in new and exciting ways, access Digg from your mobile device, and much more.