Spinal Fire Scientia Est Potentia

Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

Greenpeace looks down on the tech giants of the world. But it looks down on Google the least. On Tuesday, the big-name environmental-rights outfit unveiled its annual ranking of the tech giants working hardest to combat climate change and shift their operations to renewable energy sources. It's called the "Cool IT Leaderboard," and this year's leader is Google, which scores a mere 53 points out of 100. Cisco, last year's leader, dropped to second, with 49 points.

The latest board shakeup comes on the heels of founder Jerry Yang?s resignation from the board and ex-PayPal/eBay executive Scott Thompson?s hiring as CEO in January. On Twitter, Dealbook?s Evelyn Rusli reported that a source, pointing to Thompson and Webb?s shared history at eBay, called Yahoo?s overhaul ?a soft eBay takeover.?

Less-lethal weapons-makers are busy coming up with their own brainy bullets...Like a munition that senses when it strikes soft flesh, and then deploys a devastating payload to "attack three of the five human senses."

Oh, good. Just in time for this evening?s nightmares: A gigantic, incredibly powerful robot is finally available for purchase. While supplies last.

A newly identified disease dubbed the Schmallenberg virus is moving rapidly through livestock in Europe, and it has authorities both worried and puzzled. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.

According to the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, telecom companies Rogers and Bell Canada have in their labs an early prototype of Apple's rumored television set. Although the possibility of an honest-to-goodness prototype being tested is exciting, the idea that it's being scrutinized by telco operators is actually the more interesting part of the report.

Apple has been successful with its retail stores for reasons that are almost entirely specific to Apple. There is no reason, besides ego, for any company to mimic Apple's approach unless that approach is a good fit for their business. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has plenty of ego, but he isn't foolish.

Open source vendor Red Hat today rolled out its Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services, which it said "enables organizations to extend their datacenter storage to the cloud."

A startup called SonicNotify embeds inaudibly high-pitched audio signals within music or any other audio track. When a compatible app hears that signal, it triggers any available smartphone function to link you to websites, display text, bring up map locations, display a photo, let you vote on which song a performer plays next and so on.

A one-of-a-kind website enabling the online sale of pre-owned digital-music files got a major legal boost when a federal judge late Monday refused to shutter it at the request of Capitol Records.

Adobe has partnered with Mozilla to build a more secure version of Flash for Firefox. As with a previous effort for Google's Chrome browser, Adobe wants to make sure that something as simple as watching a movie in Firefox won't mean compromising your PC.

Every year, Nikon holds a photomicrography contest that honors some of the best microscope images you'll ever see. This year, they've added video with their Nikon Small World in Motion competition. The best of more than 200 videos show amazing microscopic activity, including cells dividing, ants feasting and asexual yeast budding.

Hackers with the Anonymous collective have released source code for Symantec's pcAnywhere product after failing to secure $50,000 from the company in an extortion attempt.

Facebook may be the last great company of the desktop age. It's beaten back Friendster, MySpace and a half-dozen other pretenders, and ? at least so far ? is successfully holding off both Twitter and Google+. Its desktop display advertisements make the company billions of dollars in revenue. But that's not nearly enough. Now, Zuckerberg has to further capitalize on the growth of mobile to extend its reach. And he knows it.

Amazon Web Services has lowered the price of its S3 cloud storage service for both standard and government clients.

Is a data center built into a standard 20-foot shipping container on your shopping list, cloud service providers? That's the question some are asking as these portable data centers, pioneered by Sun with its Project Blackbox (later dubbed Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD), enter their sixth year of commercial availability.

The Chrome Beta for Android is now live -- and it's quite an improvement over Android's generic browser app thanks to a unique syncing feature. Gadget lab provides a hands-on, first-look analysis of Google new mobile browser.

Google launched a beta version of Chrome for Android smartphones and tablets Tuesday, delivering a mobile version of the popular desktop web browser after a very long wait. Indeed, both Android and Chrome launched more than three years ago, and users have demanded unification ever since.

Google's Chrome web browser will stop relying on a decades-old method for ensuring SSL certificates are valid. As one Google engineer explains, "it?s worthless because it only works when you don?t need it."