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The network formally launched its own website on Tuesday, MSNBC president Phil Griffin announced in a email to the company on Tuesday. "Some of you have been hearing about it for months – others for years – but I’m delighted to say the day has finally arrived." Griffin wrote. "For the first time in 17 years we have our own digital home, and starting this afternoon you can type in “msnbc.com” into your browser to see what all the excitement has been about." The website allows MSNBC to once and for all untangle its brand ties with NBC News following their split with Microsoft, which co-owned MSNBC.com, in 2012. Earlier in October, executive editor of MSNBC.com Richard Wolffe told the Huffington Post that the website would be the "first true digital home for MSNBC."

Google smartwatch is in late-stage development and the company is in talks with Asian suppliers to begin mass production of the device, people familiar with the matter said. The new device, which will run on Android, will be integrated with Google Now, the company's intelligent personal assistant that can answer questions, make recommendations and predict what information users need based on what they are doing, a person familiar with the situation said. Google has also been working to reduce power consumption on the smartwatch so it won't require frequent battery charges, the person said.  The smartwatch will be able to communicate with other devices such as a smartphone, and draw information such as travel schedules from a user's email through Google Now, the person said. The device could be ready for mass production within months, the person said.

 An interesting concept for a modular smartphone blew up online in September, with Dave Hakkens revealing his idea for Phonebloks. It turns out that Hakkens wasn't the only one to be imagining a brave new future for smartphones, with Motorola announcing it has been working on a similar concept for the past year. Could Motorola Ara actually happen or is it still, despite Google's enviable and practically unlimited resources, a nice idea that is unlikely ever to become reality? Phonebloks generated a lot of press thanks to its innovative vision that, were it to become reality, could irrevocably change the smartphone market. The need to upgrade every year or two years would be gone, with the consumer given power over which individual components they wanted to upgrade or replace. Project Ara is Motorola's take on the same concept, with the company developing a free and open

Well, we really should have seen this one coming. The humble door lock key, which has been around in one form or another for literally thousands of years, may be getting replaced by an app ... or more specifically, by an app that works with a dedicated lock. It’s called the UniKey system, and it has some features that are actually kind of clever. The UniKey app transmits a Bluetooth signal from the user ’s iPhone , Android or BlackBerry smartphone, which is picked up by a paired UniKey deadbolt lock as it is approached by the user. All the user has to do when they subsequently reach the door is simply touch the outer surface of the lock, at which point the bolt will electronically withdraw. A touch of the lock can likewise be used to engage it when the user is leaving.

 FOR centuries the Leaning Tower of Pisa has defied gravity – but now it seems it is losing some of its tilt. It has straightened up by an inch after an 11-year project to reinforce its foundations. Now locals in the Tuscan town in Italy fear not so much a collapse – as the possibility that it will be too straight to bring in tourists. An annual report on the monument’s stability has revealed that the tower had spontaneously recovered some of its vertical incline-straightening by 2.5cm since 2001. The straightening is not a miracle, but the long term effect of an 11-year restoration project completed in 2001. Previously the 56m bell tower’s tilt was increasing by more than a millimetre a year creating a danger that it could collapse altogether.  In 1993 it was leaning by 5.4m, compared to 3.8m in 1817 and just 1.4m in 1350.

One day there will be a new must-have gadget. It will be on every Christmas list. Pop singers will drop its name in their lyrics, and shoppers might trample each other to get it. Right now, the Samsung Galaxy Gear won’t be that gadget. Reviews have been tepid at best, and one report said that the device’s return rate is above 30 percent at Best Buy. Samsung hyped up its new product with slick ads that were essentially a collage of smartwatches worn by fictional characters in movies and television shows. Neat! You can finally be like Dick Tracy or Inspector Gadget . But there’s one huge problem.

Wary of cyber snooping, the government could ban e-mail services such as Gmail and Yahoo for official communications by December this year in a move to safeguard its critical and sensitive data. The government is expected to route all its official communication through the official website NIC's email service. The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) is drafting a policy on e-mail usage for government offices and departments and the policy is almost ready. The department is now taking views from other ministries on it. "E-mail policy of the government of India, as this policy will be called, is almost ready and we are taking views from other ministries on this. Our effort will be to operationalise it by mid or end-December," DEITY Secretary J Satyanarayana told reporters on the sidelines of a CII summit.

A new version of Google Glass, the company's breakthrough entry into the world of wearable tech, is on the way. Current testers, or "Explorers," in Google's parlance, will get a chance to swap out their current models for the new ones, the company said in a Google+ post. The new Google Glass hardware will work with eyeglasses or shades, and include an ear bud to replace the speaker in the current model. The bone-conduction speaker, which, similar to some hearing aids, literally sends sound waves through the skull to the ear, has been called faulty by some testers. The swap begins Friday and testers will have 60 days to decide if they want new Glass. The roughly 10,000 current testers also be able to invite up to three friends into the program, which requires testers to fork over the current $1,500 price of the glasses. "Over the next few weeks, all Explorers will have the opportunity to invite three friends to join the program," the post said.

Material scientists at Vanderbilt University have developed a supercapacitor made out of silicon. Previously thought to be kind of a crazy idea, the silicon capacitor can be built into a chip — which could give cellphones weeks of life from one charge, or solar cells that produce energy with or without the sun. Pretty sweet deal. Published in Scientific Reports , the first-ever silicon supercap stores energy by gathering ions on the surface of the porous material. Different from batteries, which work on chemical reactions, the silicon supercaps can be charged in minutes and last way longer. Silicon had been considered unsuitable for supercaps because of the way it reacts with the electrolytes that make the energy-storing ions.

sunlight for the first time ever thanks to giant mirrors.The mountains that surround the village of Rjukan are far from Himalayan, but they are high enough to deprive its 3,500 inhabitants of direct sunlight for six months a year. That was before a century-old idea, as old as Rjukan itself, was brought to life: to install mirrors on a 400-metre (437-yard) high peak to deflect sunrays towards the central square. Residents of a remote village nestled in a steep-sided valley in southern Norway are about to enjoy winter

Ever wonder why snakes inspire such fear? A new study on monkeys out Monday says the brain has specific cells that fire off rapid warnings when confronted with slithery danger. Certain neurons respond "selectively" to images of snakes, and they outpace comparable neurons that react to visuals of faces, hands or geometric shapes, the researchers said. The report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers new evidence to support the notion that primates evolved keen vision skills so they could survive the threats snakes pose in the jungle. "It really strengthens the argument that snakes are very important for the evolution of primates," lead co-author Lynne Isbell, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of California Davis, told.

The ability to shrink laboratory-scale processes to automated chip-sized systems would revolutionize biotechnology and medicine. For example, inexpensive and highly portable devices that process blood samples to detect biological agents such as anthrax are needed by the U.S. military and for homeland security efforts. One of the challenges of "lab-on-a-chip" technology is the need for miniaturized pumps to move solutions through micro-channels. Electroosmotic pumps (EOPs), devices in which fluids appear to magically move through porous media in the presence of an electric field , are ideal because they can be readily miniaturized. EOPs however, require bulky, external power sources, which defeats the concept of portability.

Thomas Jefferson defended the right to pursue happiness in the Declaration of Independence . But that’s so 237 years ago. Many modern societies champion everyone’s right to be happy pretty much all the time. Good luck with that, says psychologist Joseph Forgas of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. A lack of close friends, unfulfilled financial dreams and other harsh realities leave many people feeling lonely and forlorn a lot of the time. But there’s a mental and social upside to occasional downers that often goes unappreciated. “Bad moods are seen in our happiness-focused culture as representing a problem, but we need to be aware that temporary, mild negative feelings have important benefits,” Forgas says. Growing evidence suggests that gloomy moods improve key types of thinking and behavior, Forgas asserts in a new review paper aptly titled “Don’t worry, be sad!” For good evolutionary reasons, positive and negative moods subtly recruit thinking styles suit

Lock Screen was a new concept when Windows 8 was launched. It shows the time, your Wi -Fi status and some other useful information. Although, Microsoft has added only limited customization feature to customize Lock Screen in Windows 8 and 8.1 as well. I had published one article Give a New Look to Windows 8 Lock Screen with Lock Screen Customizer that shows you that how you can change Windows 8 Lock Screen using the Lock Screen Customizer application. Now this app has been updated and supports Windows 8.1 and can also be used to change Time Format , Logon settings and Lock Screen Slideshow Duration.

Turkey will on Tuesday unveil the world's first sea tunnel connecting two continents, fulfilling a sultan's dream 150 years ago, but also fueling recent anti-government sentiment for such mega projects. "Our ancestors worked on (the project). It fell to us to realize it," said Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the rail tunnel under the Bosphorus linking the European and Asian sides of the bustling city of Istanbul. The bold project was first imagined by a sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdoul Medjid, in 1860, but he lacked the technology and funds to take his idea further. Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, revived the plan in 2004 as one of his grandiose construction projects for the city that also include a third airport, a parallel canal and a third bridge -- all denounced as "pharaonic" by his critics.

Scientists announced the launch on November 5, the first Indian mission to Mars, which had been delayed due to problems in the positioning of a system that tracks the operation on board a ship. The launch of the unmanned Mars Orbiter Mission had to be rescheduled after the Indian Space Agency (ISRO) said it could not carry it on October 28, as expected. Two Indian ships were sent to Fiji in the Pacific Ocean, making for a constant tracking of the rocket, but one of them took to arrive due to bad weather. "The Mars Orbiter Mission has been rescheduled for November 5 and their spacecraft will be launched at 14h36 IST (Indian standard time) the Sriharikota space center," said spokesman ISRO, Deviprasad Karnik. The 1.3 tonne spacecraft will be launched aboard a rocket 350 tons of Sriharikota, in the Bay of Bengal, about 80 km northeast of Chennai. The Martian mission, expected to last nine months, was approved by the government with a budget of 4.5

U.S President Barack Obama spoke on Friday at a science and technology-focused high school in Brooklyn, N.Y., to praise it for ushering in a new way to prepare students for jobs in technology. He also outlined aggressive plans to bring high-speed Internet to every student in the United States. "We should give every student access to the world's information," Obama told attendees. "The federal agency is moving forward on a plan to connect 99% of America's students to high-speed Internet within five years. We need to redesign more of our high schools, so that they teach young people the skills required for a high-tech economy." The president said he has already met business leaders and innovative educators to learn how to best bring tech into the classroom, and the P-Tech High School, formerly known as Pathways in Technology Early College High School, is a major part of that initiative.

Livescribe broke new ground last year with the Sky WiFi pen that could transfer handwritten and audio notes straight to the cloud (well, to your Evernote account anyway), so that they'd be accessible anywhere there's an internet connection. Having to jump on WiFi to send and retrieve those notes didn't make it the most convenient thing when out and about however, especially if you rely on your smartphone or tablet as a daily driver.Enter the Livescribe 3, which offers a solution to that problem. The company's latest smartpen is positioned as a companion specifically designed to work in concert with a compatible mobile device, which in this case only applies to those that run iOS. Once paired via Bluetooth LE, notes written in a Livescribe notebook will automatically appear on the accompanying Livescribe+ app. Indeed, the application and mobile device are so integral to the Livescribe 3, that unlike the Echo or the Sky, the 3 does not have a built-in mi

LG's unveiled all the details for its often-leaked, curved screen smartphone. Weighing in at 177g with a 6-inch (but 720p) curved OLED display, it's powered by a Snapdragon 800 processor and 2GB of RAM, with a 13-megapixel camera housed above the two rear control buttons, which is now LG's thing. In comparison to Samsung's Galaxy Round, the screen on the G Flex arcs from top to bottom, not side-to-side, which at least makes a little more sense to us, hopefully fitting in better to the curvature of the users' face. We're yet to handle either curved phone IRL just yet, however, when we'll be able to offer up a better perspective on how both devices actually feel.

The mystery surrounding a large structure built on a barge docked in San Francisco bay is deepening. Is it a floating Google data center? A floating Google Glass store? Or something else altogether? A company, very likely Google, has set up shop on Treasure Island, located between San Francisco and Oakland, and has been building a large structure made from shipping, or cargo, containers on a barge. Some evidence suggests it might be a floating data center, including the fact that Google itself has a patent for such a concept.Google has not responded to multiple requests for comment.The Portland (Maine) Press Herald also ran a story recently about a structure on a barge showing up there, and photographs taken by the newspaper look similar to what is being built in the San Francisco Bay. Plus, the barge being used in San Francisco and the barge in Maine are both owned by the same company , By and Large, which is leasing a large hangar adjacent to the Treasure Island pier

After weeks of rumors about the specs, price and release date of the upcoming Nexus 5, it appears that Google's new Nexus Android smartphone was listed on the Google Play store, before being taken down on Thursday. The device appeared next to the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 along with the caption "Capture the everyday and the epic in fresh new ways." Google lists the price as "starting at $349." However, when the link to the smartphone is clicked on -- the new page didn't load. And not long after the phone appeared, it was replaced by the older Nexus 4 again. Rumors have been flying the past few weeks about what Google has in mind for the Nexus 5. Supposedly, the device will run Android 4.4 KitKat and be revealed in the coming weeks. The smartphone has been said to cost anywhere from $299 to $399 for the 16GB and $449 for the 32GB. Just last week, the first third-party cases for the device were spotted on Google+. While Google has stayed mum about the official r