[From News.CNet.com]

The Chandra X-ray Observatory delivers astrophysicists another breathtaking first by capturing a dwarf galaxy smashing into a large spiral one.

Now this is what it’s like when galaxies collide.

Or at the very least, this is what it

[From www.News.CNet.com]

When most of the tech industry seems obsessed with finding each other at restaurants and ranking their own influence, it’s exciting to hear about tech that could change the world. So why are we all so skeptical about it?

I heart the Hyperloop. When I heard that Elon Musk planned to hold a press call to unveil his design and the science behind a radical new form of technology — a pneumatic-like tube that could shoot passengers at speeds of up to 800 miles per hour between San Francisco and Los Angeles — I was thrilled.

And I remain thrilled, despite all the Debbie Downer arguments that there are no plans to build the Hyperloop anytime soon, that no company currently exists to build such a thing, and that the usual toxic combination of politics, money, and monopoly will probably prevent such a thing from being built anytime in the next several decades, if ever. I am not even interested in hearing that from you right now, Internet.

I remain thrilled because we are actually

[From www.News.CNet.com]

Notice older stories popping up on your News Feed? Or, seeing more posts from one friend rather than another? It’s all part of Facebook’s top-secret ranking system.

Facebook offered a deep dive into its its News Feed ranking algorithm on Tuesday, expounding on why it moves up old stories and how it picks which stories it thinks you want to see.

Lars Backstrom, the engineering manager in charge of News Feed ranking, explained how Facebook sorts through the “tens of thousands” of potential posts users put on Facebook each day. While there is a median of 1,500 potential stories that a user can see daily, Facebook inserts about 300 based on an algorithm that guesses how interested you w

ill be in a post by factoring users’ reactions to previous posts and the users. Each post is given a score and placed depending on that score. The more likes and comments people make, the more data Facebook has to work with.

“It’s a very personalized thing, it depends on your relationship to the person, what things you’ve liked in the past,” Backstrom said, echoing CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s often mentioned “personalized newspaper” comparison.

One way Facebook has done this is a method called “story bumping,” which moves up older stories that you might not have seen because it was “below the fold” of your News Feed.

“It’s really hard for users to get back to old things, you have to scroll back to things you’ve already seen,” Backstrom said.

In explaining these changes, Facebook hopes to shed some light on why it makes the changes it does. Past changes have sparked controversy. Product Manager Will Cathcart said Tuesday’s event was timed with the rollout of the bumping stories method, but the company plans to proactively talk about changes to the news feed in the future. Facebook has even started

[From www.CNet.com]

If multiple users on an OS X system use iTunes, by default each will have a separate iTunes media folder in which music files are stored. This is convenient for privacy, but it will prevent users from sharing common music, which may be desired for household members or coworkers using the sameMac.

If you would like to share the same media files in

[From www.BoingBoing.com]

A pair of crooks in Oklahoma made more than $400,000 with

[From www.news.CNet.com]

Formed of antibodies and DNA, these molecular automata could help design better drugs to fight cancer, autoimmune diseases.

Sometimes I can’t believe that it’s 2013 and we still don’t have tiny, disease-fighting robots swimming around in our bodies.

Well, researchers at the

[From www.news.CNet.com]

Apple’s testing a new version of iTunes with its upcoming iTunes Radio service built in, and is now giving it to developers to test.

The feature was bundled inside a beta version of

[From www.news.CNet.com]

Apple held on to the top spot for four years before finally giving way to Samsung and its handsets in the second quarter.

Apple has lost another battle in its ongoing war with Samsung.

Research firm Strategy Analytics

[From www.news.CNet.com]

Five men have been accused by the U.S. government of perpetrating the largest hacking scheme ever prosecuted in the United States.

Court documents revealed Thursday in federal court in New Jersey said the five men from Russia and Ukraine were able to hack into the computer systems at the Nasdaq, J.C. Penney, 7-Eleven, and JetBlue Airways, among other companies.

[From www.NBCNews.com]

Are people with laptops and big phones more assertive than iPod and feature-phone users? Or do assertive people just tend to get bigger screens? Surprisingly, a recent Harvard study found thatusing a bigger device actually does seem to affect people’s behavior.

Maarten Bos and Amy Cuddy, researchers at Harvard’s Business School, wanted to determine whether the type of device people use changes how they act around other people.