A developer who is working on a Google voice application for the iPhone says he has resubmitted his application and expects to receive a positive response from Apple shortly.

James Martin

Google Voice Mobile developer Sean Kovacs developer, Sean Kovacs, wrote on his blog that the application "is currently undergoing review, which should last seven to 13 days before hitting the U.S. App Store."

Although the app has been submitted and rejected before, Kovacs believes that the recent posting by Apple of the approval process it uses to judge proposed developer apps offer renewed hope of receiving a positive reply. The move to publish the document last week came after more than two years of complaints from developers about Apple's often opaque decision-making process, which block certain programs from the store, cutting off applicants from the potentially lucrative market selling apps for Apple's popular iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Hewlett-Packard's

During an interview with VentureBeat's founder Matt Marshall as part of this year's Demo Fall conference, McKinney said that the WebOS-based version of the company's slate is well on track for its release early next year, but that HP is currently working hard to get its Windows 7-based slate out the door first.

With eyes on a Mars landing in the summer of 2012, NASA has successfully put the next version of the lander vehicle through its paces. The rover, which is called `Curiosity,' has been tackling obstacles at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The suspension system on NASA Mars rover Curiosity easily accommodates rolling over a ramp

/ NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Curiosity features the same six-wheel, rocker-bogie suspension system found on earlier Mars rover. Its wheels measure 20 inches n diameter, which are double the height of the wheels on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers which are now on the Red Planet.

NASA says that the vehicle is expected to explore Mars for a full Martian year, roughly equivalent to two Earth years. As with other rovers, this one will be scooping up samples from the Martian surfaces as well as from rocks. But what's also notable about this rover generation is that the Curiosity will be tasked with the mission of helping determine whether the planet was able to support life.

Test operators monitor how NASA's Mars rover Curiosity handles driving over a ramp during a test.

/ NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Curiosity is a technical marvel. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators will generate electricity from decaying plutonium and the rover will be able to reach a maximum speed of 300 feet per hour (though it's more likely to move across the Martian surface at a much slower clip.) The Curiosity also comes with a steep price tag, with cost overruns previously estimated at being close to 30%. You can find out more about the mission here. Also, check out the video below with the Curiosity taking its first, albeit brief, test run.

Male babies that rapidly put on weight during their first six months will likely wind up having more sex when they reach young adulthood.

Gordon Donovan/CBS News.com

Researchers reported their conclusions today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Based on their survey tracking more than 700 men from birth to early adulthood in the Philippines, the researchers said that this set of males reached puberty earlier. It also found that as young adults, they had higher testosterone levels and tended to be taller, more muscular, and possessed higher grip strength.

"They also had sex earlier and were more likely to report having had sex in the past month, resulting in more lifetime sex partners," the paper reports. However, the researchers were unable to find evidence of similar links in female subjects.

Although biologists have previously established links between babies' pre-natal adaptation and subsequent behavior as adults, today's findings elicited some skepticism in scientific circles. For instance, speaking with Science Now, Peter Ellison of Harvard University offered an alternative explanation to the proposed link between these boys' rapid maturation and their adaptive response later on in life.

The differences in growth rates could reflect genetic traits inherited from parents that influence how sensitive different boys are to testosterone, for example, which would make them grow faster and stronger. Regardless, Ellison says this is a very "rich" result that suggests many angles of new research, such as testing whether levels of testosterone in newborns, really influence rates of weight gain.

Although Yahoo still leads Bing in most measures of search market share, Microsoft's search engine has passed up Yahoo, according to one tracking firm.

Nielsen, which says its numbers reflect only queries typed into a search box, has Bing at 13.9 percent, just ahead of Yahoo's 13.1 percent. Google is still the dominant market leader with roughly 65 percent of the market.

In the past year, Yahoo has seen its share slip 2.9 percentage points, while Microsoft's search engine has gained 3.2 percentage points. Google is little changed from a year earlier. And of course, with a search deal going into effect last month, Bing is Continue »

LONDON--It is hard to ignore the paradox at Nokia's global partner and developer conference: the company sells more smartphones than anyone else in the industry but is fighting for its life.

Nokia executives speaking here Tuesday didn't try to dismiss the years of trouble that culminated last week in the hiring of Microsoft's Stephen Elop as its new chief executive. Nokia's management is facing Apple's and Google's economic might, brand power, and sudden relevance in the mobile phone market that Nokia once dominated.

With words that were at times defiant, defensive, and strident, though, three Nokia leaders tried to show a new assertiveness to the programmers and mobile phone service providers that the company needs as allies.

"We haven't been as competitive as we want to be in smartphones. That's about to change," said Niklas Savender, Nokia's executive vice president of sales. "Today, we shift into high gear in Nokia's fight back in smartphone leadership."Continue »

Though there's no way to know if Halo: Reach will break any sales records, it's a sure bet to be one of the biggest sellers of 2010 and will give Microsoft yet another exclusive title to tout when it promotes the Xbox 360--none of the Halo games is available on Sony's PlayStation or Nintendo's Wii consoles.

But Halo: Reach didn't come out of nowhere. Bungie released the original Halo in 2001 for Microsoft's original Xbox, and the hits haven't stopped coming: first Halo 2, then Halo 3, then Halo Wars (developed not by Bungie, but by Ensemble Studios), Halo 3: ODST and now, finally, Halo: Reach.

To commemorate the game's release, CNET has put together this gallery of screenshots, artists' renderings, concept art, and magazine covers spanning the nine years and six games in the series.

Researchers have previously turned up links between playing action video games and better hand-to-eye coordination. One study even found that doctors who played video games enjoyed superior surgery skills compared to their non-video-playing colleagues. But how far should we consider video games as training tools to augment our responses to real-life situations? Apparently, a lot further than many assumed.

Researchers say they have established for the first time a connection between playing first-person shooter games and making fast and accurate decisions.

J. Adam Fenster, University of Rochester

The investigation, which was carried out by a team from the University of Rochester, assembled a test group of video-gamers and measured their reaction skills against another group consisting of non-players. The participants in the test - including those who didn't usually play action video games - were found to have improved inference skills after playing 50 hours, compared with a test group that didn't play at all, according to the researchers.

Their work, published in Current Biology, found that action video game play benefits performance in "an array of sensory, perceptual, and attentional tasks" that went far beyond the specifics of game play.

Rochester professor of brain and cognitive science, Daphne Bavelier, said that the brains of action video game players' collected visual and auditory information more efficiently, assembling relevant amounts of information needed to make decisions more rapidly than non-gamers. This process, called probabilistic inference, describes a process in which the brain accumulates and synthesizes bits of visual or auditory information until the person is ready to render what they perceive to be an accurate decision. At the same time, she disputed suggestions that action game players were prone to be trigger-happy and less accurate. She said it was just the opposite, in fact. "They are just as accurate and also faster," Bavelier said. "Action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference."

Happy 25th birthday, Super Mario Bros.

/ NINTENDO

Super Mario Bros. launched on September 13, 1985, in Japan. The title, which allowed players to take on the role of Mario (and Luigi for multiplayer purposes) in his trek to save Princess Peach, was the best-selling video game of all time for over 20 years before it was eventually ousted by Wii Sports in 2009. The original release of the game sold 40 million units worldwide.

Time's Five Favorite Super Mario Bros. Tributes

The importance of Super Mario Bros. to the gaming industry should not be underestimated: it influenced slews of titles that followed and was responsible for the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Read the full story at CNET

It's easy enough to search on the Internet for George Carlin's famous riff on language. But good luck trying to use Google Instant to search for some of the words the late, great comedian mentioned in his monologue.

Actress Demi Moore.

/ AP

Continue »

Microsoft's top lawyer said on Monday that the company is taking action in the wake of a report that its antipiracy efforts have been used by the Russian government as a means to monitor computers of dissident groups in that country.

In a blog post, general counsel Brad Smith said that the company is hiring an outside law firm to investigate a report in The New York Times that the Russian government has used Microsoft's antipiracy efforts as a pretext to search computers of potential dissidents and, separately, that some lawyers hired by Microsoft have worked with corrupt police to shake down businesses over the piracy issue.

Continue »

Download CBS News for iPad

Just as the laptop and portability changed the face of computing over the last two decades, the iPad, and competitors who are quickly following in Apple's footsteps, marks the beginning of a new era in computing and deeper embedding of technology in our daily lives.

Paul Saffo, a forecaster who has explored the long term impact of technology innovations, said that the iPad is as "important as the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984," which launched the graphical user interface and mouse to the masses.

What makes the iPad potential game changer? Certainly, the size and light weight of the tablet-sized iPad, as well as the touch interface evolved from the iPhone, offer a more "personal" and convenient computing experience. But more important, the iPad and its underlying software has the beginnings of a platform for rich, interactive applications that changes how users interact with content.

Adapting the iPad application model is at the core of the launch of our first CBS News iPad application, which is available for free in the Apple App Store. Instead of clicking on Web pages with a mouse or touchpad, you use your fingers to navigate and interact with the content with swiping, dragging, scissoring and other gestures.

The CBS News iPad app brings you the latest news from cbsnews.com, with text, video, and photos, as well as content from "The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric," "The Early Show," "48 Hours Mystery," "Sunday Morning," "Face the Nation" and "Up to the Minute." A separate "60 Minutes" iPad app is in the works.

The CBS News app for iPad includes related content -- text, videos and photo galleries--for each story, and one-touch social networking features, which allow users to share stories with friends and colleagues via e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.

The front page of the CBS News app has two viewing experiences. In portrait mode, users can browse headlines with images and related thumbnail photos, or use the app in landscape mode, which provide a quick, mostly text view of top news, videos, popular news galleries and Twitter messages.

Other features include the option to save articles for offline viewing, searching news by content type, weather targeted by location, stock look-up and an easy-to-browse section for CBS News and CBSNews.com programs online.

Stay tuned for updates as we evolve our iPad application and develop apps for emerging tablet devices. CBS News is also available on the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Symbian platforms.

The once-in-a-lifetime encounter between an underwater cameraman and a larceny-minded manta ray is now part of posterity.

Travis Matteson was filming a school of mantas when what was described as the biggest fish in the bunch swam by, grabbed his $5,000 Canon 5D Mark II underwater rig and swam away. With the camera still rolling the entire time, the manta then got an opportunity to do its own filming of the underwater neighborhood before dropping the it right below the boat. Camera and diver were subsequently reunited.