And how prettily it is displayed when it is covered in dew! I took this photo on my way to the rail earlier this week. The more I think about it, the more it reminds me that we all have to attend to some business or another to manage our daily lives.

With a little instruction and education, hundreds if not thousands of volunteers armed with smart phones, computers and Internet access can act as the eyes, ears and hands of scientists worldwide. That idea is the hallmark of the growing citizen-science movement, which is already recruiting Facebook users to virtually “infect” their friends with a simulated [...]

Earlier today Mozilla introduced Collusion, an add-on for the Firefox browser that shows you how companies are tracking you as you surf the Web. A cool visual demonstration of the software illustrates all the links that form as you crisscross just a few popular sites online, including IMDB, the New York Times and the Huffington [...]

Spiders’ silk has been the envy of materials engineers for decades. Its combination of flexibility and durability has been difficult to match with even the most advanced technology. “It is stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar by weight,” Markus Buehler, an engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a prepared statement. A new [...]

A consulting company named AptiQuant published an intriguing press release late last week. “Is Internet Explorer For The Dumb? A New Study Suggests Exactly That” inspired many legitimate news organizations to report the story just as the press release suggested, often decorated with comments along the lines of, “Is anyone really surprised?” The online community [...]

The launch of the Google+ social network casts a shadow over Google’s previous efforts in this arena, including Orkut, Wave and Buzz, all of which still have active Web sites. For the most part Google+’s predecessors will coexist alongside the new social network as Google determines what works and what doesn’t. Google launched Orkut in [...]

Domain name registries and marketers can rejoice now that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has given its blessing to a plan encouraging the use of much more creative Web addresses. On Monday ICANN’s Board of Directors voted to increase the number of Internet domain-name endings—called generic top-level domains (gTLDs)—from the seemingly [...]