Hello! Here are the links to tech stories you may have seen today on the Captivate Network:

Finding Spies on Facebook
The U.K.’s Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, has declared it is using Facebook to find new devotees as part of an ‘open recruitment campaign.’

Google takes a stand
Flexing political muscle, Google has taken an official corporate position against Prop. 8, a ballot measure to amend the Calif. constitution to ban gay marriage.

Collider still warming up
CERN physicists will have to wait 3 weeks for the damaged section of the LCH to be warmed up to room temp so they can get inside to see what went wrong.

Labels: CERN, facebook, Google, Large Hadron Collider, MI6, politics, Prop 8, Spies

Let's take a peek around the web for this week's top stories, shall we?

I joked about it a few times, but joke no more: Google's gPhone is real. The phone, called Dream from vendor HTS, will debut in Oct., according to reports, and will feature Google's mobile OS Android. Set to cost around $200, much less than the iPhone iterations, this one definitely has Steve Jobs shaking in his arrogant boots.

Oh Bill Gates, how you disappoint me. Jerry Seinfeld? Really? He hit his peak in the early 90s, recently made a bad kids-only-like-it cartoon, and you hire him to help give Microsoft a new image? I'm not surprised the public berated it and you've been forced to drop the not-funny Seinfeld ad campaign after only 2 commercials. Sheesh. Way to get my back after all those compliments. Alas, there is a light -- perhaps the second phase of the $300 M ad campaign, poking fun at Apple and embracing the 'I'm a PC' image, will be better received.

Yikes -- scientists have been forced to shut down the Large Hadron Collider after only a day of use after a massive cooling mechanism failed. Whoever designed that part is SO fired. Thankfully, engineers have got the 17-ton component fixed and the LHC is back online.

Google made some big headlines this week -- in addition to the gPhone thing -- with a controversial UK decision to allow ads from religious groups opposing abortions, a new deal Google signed with GE to develop and promote sustainable energy solutions, and an announcement the company is moving ahead with an advertising deal with Yahoo despite worries form the government.

New games in stores this week include Stars Wars: The Force Unleashed. Finally, Lucas comes out with something awesome that totally lives up to expectations. This will be the hot one, so I hope you have your copy reserved. I will be chilling on the couch 'navigating' it this weekend -- or rocking out to Rock Band 2, which looks very cool and lets you use downloaded songs in tour playlists. It also allows you to form a band online and battle against other online bands. Very cool.

Have a great weekend, everyone -- catch you on the flip side!

Labels: Apple, CERN, Force Unleashed, gates, geek lingo, Google, hts dream, i'm a PC, Large Hadron Collider, microsoft ad campaign, online, Rock Band 2, seinfeld, Star Wars, sustainable energy, Yahoo

Happy 'Big Bang' Day! You are obviously reading this, so we will all assume that the universe has not changed, Earth was not sucked into a massive black hole (unless we are a part of some twisted LOST episode) and the most brilliant humans are the planet are gathering data on how our universe began.

Confused yet? In what is probably the biggest (literally and figuratively) sci-tech news of the past century, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility in Geneva (known to most normal humans because of it's reference in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, which is, coincidentally, being made into a movie as you read this) became fully operational today.

What is the LHC? It's a huge underground circular tube -- the biggest machine ever built, with a 17-mile diameter -- that speeds up protons around and around and collides them more 30 million times a second, which smashes them up and releases the particles hidden inside the proton at nearly the speed of light. This gives scientists an absolutely unreal an, until now, unheard of amount of information on particle physics, which relates back to the Big Bang and how our universe works. According to Scientific American, 'You could think of it as the biggest, most powerful microscope in the history of science.'

Much beyond that, things get a little too complicated for me to wrap my head around. But, yay! I'm really looking forward to the news coming out of CERN from the analysis of the LHC particles.

Labels: Big Bang Theory, CERN, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, particle physics