In a surprise that may mean Yahoo! actually has a clue once again, they have named Marissa Mayer as CEO of the faltering brand.

She wanted to leave Google and nailed the best possible way. She’s been a Google vice president after joining the search giant early on and is commonly considered a visionary behind the much-lauded design aspects of the Google user experience.

How do I know young computer programmers are going to suddenly want to work for the re-energized company, though it will have had its 5th CEO in a year and even the guy running Hulu thought it was a step down? Easy. Mayer is not only brilliant, she looks like this:
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A team at BAE System in Sweden has developed new technology called Adaptiv which is basically an ‘invisibility cloak’ they claim can make modern war tanks look like part of the landscape. Even cows.

Adaptiv has scanners that read objects on the landscape and reproduce them using patterns of hot and cold on panels on the hull of the vehicle. An infrared image is then produced, making it effectively invisible to enemies who will read their cloaked tank as a car or even a cow. Large hexagonal metal plates can be heated or cooled to disguise buildings, ships or helicopters.
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Sometimes people want to make stories small because they feel you are more ‘in touch’ with the characters. “War and Peace” is not small, I am not in touch with Napoleon, but it is a darn good book so a show like “Boardwalk Empire” fails because, basically, nothing important happens, they just try and introduce important names.

“Game of Thrones”, by contrast, is a 10-part series based on the first book of “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R.R. Martin, and it throws out all that ‘stay small’ nonsense. Sure, the story has characters but they are trying for an epic. Will it work? I think so, they have an all-star sword/fantasy cast in Lena Headey, Sean Bean, etc. Oh. And a dwarf. And zombies! But it’s also a good idea to watch because of Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen.
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It’s Rocket Science, I Tell You!

The people of Libya are currently trying to give Gaddafi a rocket.

A while back, Gaddafi gave his people a rocket.

A british team is currently working on giving the record books a rocket.

Blogging has been around since the late 1990s and email (effectively) for a decade prior to that – both are now on the wane, according to recent claims (email by social media and blogging by…social media again) and while it’s true I wouldn’t start a standalone email company today, having it as part of a suite seems like a good idea.  Since practically the day we began we have had @science20.com email addresses available to columnists and featured authors but one more email address is not really helping most people.

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Back in December, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission released a “Report and Order” specifying new rules related to network neutrality. The rules have since been challenged in court in separate suits by Verizon and Metro PCS.

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If you’re a Twitter user, you’ve likely used one or another of the URL shorteners out there. Even if you’re not, you may have run across a shortened URL. The first shortener I encountered, several years ago, was tinyurl.com, but there plenty of them, including bit.ly, tr.im, qoiob.com, tinyarrow.ws, tweak, and many others.

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Whereas in America we’ve been wasting our robot races on autonomous cars that can drive on real roads without causing Michael Bay levels of collateral damage, Japan has taken a more subtle approach.

Their “history making” bipedal robot race involves expensive toy robots stumbling through 422 laps of a 100 meter course, which is followed by visually tracking colored tape on the ground (I’m making an assumption there–the robots may actually be even less capable than that).  This is surely one of the most ingenious ways to turn old technology into a major new PR event.

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Remember when there were two well-funded start-ups competing to sell you dog food over the Internet?  And AOL could buy Time-Warner?

The good old days of pretend Internet money may be back.  Despite having no revenue, Twitter is supposedly valued at $10 billion.   And Facebook is supposedly more valuable than Ford.

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Engineers in the Internet Engineering Task Force, in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, and elsewhere have been debating how to handle e-mail-server blocklists in an IPv6 network. Let’s take a look at the problem here.

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