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As social networks proliferate, they are changing the way people think about the Internet, from a tool used in solitary anonymity to a medium that touches on questions about human nature and identity. If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populous in the world, just behind the U.S. Almost half of its users visit every day. Nielsen Online reports that social networking (and associated blogging) is now the fourth most popular online activity. Time spent on social-networking sites is growing at three times the rate of overall Internet usage, accounting for almost 10 percent of total time spent online. Social networks can lessen loneliness and boost self-esteem. But they can also have the opposite effect, depending on who you are and how you use these forums.

2010 marks 70 years since the closing of the 1939 New York World's Fair, a far more significant event than its opening. That was the year when a living vision of the future instantly became—to those of us born decades later—a myth. The day the Fair closed marks the end of the world of yesterday and the beginning of the postwar world we still live in today.

The Fair's story isn't quite over. Not to be out-futured, Westinghouse buried a time capsule to be opened in 6939. It's still down there, holding seeds, fabrics, microfilm, a Gillette safety razor, a dollar in change and a pack of Camel cigarettes. But they couldn't preserve the one thing we'd really want from the era: its inhabitants' sense of wonder and hope. That alien faith in man and his ability to build a world. That's buried somewhere deeper, forever irretrievable. I often wish I could travel back to 1939 and watch my grandmother and those other millions marvel at the World of Tomorrow, while I, in turn, marvel at the world of yesterday.

A large space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago, showering a large area with debris, according to new research.The evidence comes from accumulations of tiny meteoritic particles and a layer of extraterrestrial dust found in Antarctic ice cores.

Globalization and the rise of China owe much to undersea fiber optics and computers capable of managing complex supply chains.

The most exciting part of this phenomenon is that it is just starting. Broadband is beginning to become pervasive in the developed world. Moore's Law will keep crushing the price of computation, communication, transmission and storage. And cheap sensors are about to be thrown on to everything. If it seemed like this already changed much of the world as we know it, get ready for what is coming.

Privacy: By 2020, you will have to go to a museum to understand what it meant. Privacy eroded, due to cameras everywhere and increasing sophistication of data analysis. Most people, considering themselves good at heart, traded it away for the sake of better search results.

There is a glacier in Antarctica that seems to be weeping a river of blood. It’s one of the continent’s strangest features, and it’s located in one of the continent’s strangest places — the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a huge, ice-free zone and one of the world’s harshest deserts. So imagine you’re hiking through this – – which has been kept ice-less since God was a child because of something called the katabatic winds, which sweep over the valleys at up to 200 mph and suck all the moisture out of them. Anyway, you’re hiking along, passing dessicated penguin carcasses and such, and you come to this. A bleeding glacier. Discovered in 1911 by a member of Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition team, its rusty color was at first theorized to be caused by some sort of algae growth. Later, however, it was proven to be due to iron oxidation. Every so often, the glacier spews forth a clear, iron-rich liquid that quickly oxidizes and turns a deep shade of red. According to Discover Magazine – The source of that water is an intensely salty lake trapped beneath 1,300 feet of ice, and a new study has now found that microbes have carved out a niche for themselves in that inhospitable environment, living on sulfur and iron compounds. The bacteria colony has been isolated there for about 1.5 million years, researchers say, ever since the glacier rolled over the lake and created a cold, dark, oxygen-poor ecosystem. Even weirder: scientists think that the bacteria responsible for Blood Falls might be an Earth-bound approximation of the kind of alien life that might exist elsewhere in the solar system, like beneath the polar ice caps of Mars and Europa.