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Learn the nickname for the first synthetic organism and a derisive term for ungrammatical Tea Party signs.

Viking 2, the second mission to Mars, lands on the planet and begins transmitting pictures and soil analyses.

Using Foursquare to stamp out sexually transmitted diseases is just the beginning of a brave new war on bothersome reality. Just think of all the amazing problems we can solve with the proper mix of badges, exclusive offers and unbridled optimism.

A phone-hacking scheme involving British royals and reporters working for one of Rupert Murdoch's tabloid newspapers went far beyond what was previously disclosed and prosecuted. The British Prime Minister's current media adviser is accused of having encouraged the hacking.

If it's September, it's football season — which also means it's time for millions of fantasy football drafts around the world to commence. Maximize your in-season points while dealing with the setbacks that are bound to occur by following our guide.

The video site's ever-evolving terms of service drive an observer mad in this arty clip by Carlo Zanni. No charge for the 1984 references.

This week’s big Apple announcement featured one big disappointment: Apple TV’s relative lack of, well, TV. Out of all of the hundreds of channels available on cable and satellite, only ABC and Fox agreed to offer their programs for rent on Apple TV. The fact that Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder in, and on the board of, Disney — owner of ABC — perfectly illustrates this digital divide.

Unlike infectious disease and information, behavior change spreads faster through online networks that have many close connections instead of many distant ties. Redundancy is key, as people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see many others doing it. "There has been a lot of theory about the difference between information and behavior spreading," said economic sociologist Damon Centola of MIT and author of the study published Sept. 3 in Science. "We've assumed that they are the same, but you can imagine that behavior is not really like that, that you need to be convinced."

A new batch of sharp Martian close-ups from NASA's HiRISE camera were released, and we've gathered some of the best in the gallery.

The atmosphere of a young exoplanet didn't fit any of our existing models for what gas giants should look like. But when astronomers added huge dust clouds, it was a perfect fit, perhaps revealing a larger truth about gas giants.

Magnetic minerals in 15-million-year-old rocks appear to preserve a moment when the magnetic north pole was rapidly on its way to becoming the south pole, and vice versa.

Development Seed is engineering tools to create custom maps that work in a wider variety of situations such as natural disasters and in the developing world.

A reinterpretation of the fossil record suggests a new answer to one of evolution's existential questions: whether global mass extinctions are just short-term diversions in life's preordained course, or send life careening down wholly new paths.

The official Twitter app for iPad is finally here, and star developer Loren Brichter has polished yet another gem. Twitter for iPad sports a really elegant interface that's significantly faster and more intuitive than competing Twitter clients we've tested (such as Twitterific and Tweetdeck).

Fujitsu's scanner is your new (albeit bulky) buddy if you want high-quality images. The sturdy document feeder gets pages in straight, so you get them out right.

Google is celebrating the second birthday of its Chrome web browser with the release of Chrome 6. Among the new features are an updated user interface, auto-fill for web forms, extension syncing, increased speed and numerous bug fixes.

People in Silicon Valley have focused on the set-top box as the lever to attack the cable industry. Cable boxes blow, but that's a losing battle. So why is Apple TV different? Because Steve Jobs has not just created a new set top box. He's actually created a whole new media ecosystem built around the mobile phone.

It looks like a motorcycle, it performs like a Lotus and it's racing around the world.

String theory has finally made a prediction that can be tested with experiments — but in a completely unexpected realm of physics: quantum entanglement.

Chemical analysis of the bones of an ancient Sudanese Nubians who lived nearly 2,000 years ago shows they were ingesting the antibiotic tetracycline on a regular basis — likely from a special brew of beer. The find is the strongest yet to support that antibiotics were previously discovered by humans before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928.

Samsung has announced the launch of a tablet that could become the first major Android-powered challenger to the Apple iPad.

The uncharacteristically snowy weather that hit Northern Europe and North America in the winter of 2009 to 2010 was caused by a rare combination of two separate weather oscillations in the Atlantic and Pacific, claim meteorologists.

Superman is a surly noob searching for reality in the digital age in J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis' update of the superhero's origin story. Who knew the Man of Steel would miss the musty Daily Planet more than the rest of us?

Two psychiatric experts think the way to treat troops returning home with PTSD: Have them undergo intensive psychotherapy while they're rolling on ecstasy.

A Q&A with Jeff Ma, the former leader of the infamous MIT Blackjack Team that took Vegas for millions in the mid-'90s. Now a successful entrepreneur and author, Ma talks about his love of fantasy sports, selling his company Citizen Sports to Yahoo (and why he didn't join them), and how young statgeeks can make their way in a sports industry dominated by traditionalists.

Six weeks after landing men on the moon, Americans take another giant leap for mankind with the nation’s first cash-spewing, automated teller machine.

Blazing fast (four minutes and nine seconds!), streamlined and full of highlights, Cuisinart's PerfecTemp puts its kettle competition to shame.

Video calls aren't for people to see you — they're for people to see what you see.

In 1983 Nintendo released the Famicon console. Now 26 years later we tear it apart to see what makes it tick.

Want to start reading some science fiction, but aren't sure where to begin? This introductory sci-fi literature syllabus is just for you.