See no evil, hear no evil, text no evil. Think your text messages are just between you and the one who's meant to read it? Think again. In the US, text messaging is quickly becoming a matter of public record that can be brought as evidence in court. Read the full story by following the "read more" link below.

Medical science is always on the breakthrough to find cures for so many life-threatening illnesses these days. A recent project headed by University of Missouri-Columbia engineers based on nanotechnology aims to develop a small but powerful device capable of effectively delivering drugs to help treat these conditions.

So far, the project is in its testing phase and will be focusing on fighting various diseases on a microscopic level, such as destroying tumors, kidney stones, ulcers as well as hopefully treating cancer and HIV. Through a fusion of microchip-based technology and nanotechnology, the device triggers a reaction resulting in super sonic shock waves which will make infected cells permeable for drug interaction.

The project is headed by Shubhra Gangopadhyay, an electrical and computer engineering professor in the College of Engineering and the head of the University's International Center for Nano/Micro Systems and Nanotechnology.

Other practical uses of the technology include the dispersal of drug-carrying nanoparticles called the nanosponge into the body. This nanosponge will then target specific cells and areas that have been infected with disease. Also, through the delivery of gold nanoparticles, doctors can also track drug movement and the spread of disease throughout the body.

Such nanoparticles contain no harmful components and will be harmless to the body. The device will, however, need as many as three more years of additional testing before it can be made available to pharmaceutical companies. Nems/Mems Works, LLC will market the device and the various nanoparticles associated with the study.

IGG has announced the results of the First Myth War Online Video Contest. The competition, which ended April 13, saw up to 40 video entries. Out of all these entries, the following entrant won out over the competition:

Grand Prize: Missouri – Sliverat
Second Prize: Alps – CAJ and Missouri – sylvr
Third Prize: Missouri – Aleco, Missouri – Baralou, Alps – Equilibrium, Missouri – dorica and California – Albatross
Honorable Mentions: Alps – PsychoKlown, Alps – Eo, Achernar – killervampire, Missouri – Deceiver and Achernar – Marcuri

The rewards for the winners will be given out within five days. Those who won points will have their accounts updated directly, while the Grand and Second Prize winners will have to redeem their pets from a GM.

The Forum Suggestion contest has also ended, and here are the lucky winners:

Grand Prize (300 Mall Points): luv2kill
Second Prize (150 Mall Points each): Elazul, MrMiracle
Third Prize (100 Mall Points each): asparoth, RedderZ, LordFriday
Honorable Mention (60 Mall Points each): MomentofTruth, patroni777, grandmaster, Sliverat, Gillie2tat

The rewards will be given out within two days. The points will be charged into the winning players' accounts directly.

New Power packs are now available for IGG's Myth War Online, and that means more Titan Pets! These new packs replace the old ones and contain very favorable items. You can get either a Chaotic Devil or Chaos Devil from the packs, and this is the only way to get these Titan Pets. The new Power Packs are only available until February 28, so get a move on and grab yours today.

The latest Guild War Tournament results are also in, and here are the winners:

Server I Missouri
Guild: Heros, Master of Guild: Deceiver
Server II Achernar
Guild: Pandora, Master of Guild: Fiery
Server III California
Guild: Genesis, Master of Guild: Sparrowsong
Server IV Alps
Guild: AngelicTemplar, Master of Guild: gontxo

Sports builds, aside from muscles, camaraderie among players. Kidding aside, at the core of every competition is the desire to unite each and every participant. The Global Gaming League (GGL) together with its partners were probably thinking along this line when they launched the Professional Baseball Videogaming League (PBGL).

PBGL aims to enable online gaming competition between actual major leaguers and fans. Aside from GGL, the concept was approved by the Major League Baseball Advance Media, Boras Marketing and New York Yankees outfielder Johnny Damon. Also, Damon will serve as the league's first ever commissioner. He announced:

Both baseball and video games play a huge role in today's culture in the US and around the world, and the PBGL is doing a great job of bringing these two communities together. More importantly, the PBGL is allowing me to invoke another passion of mine.

The Wounded Warrior Project raises funds and awareness for wounded veterans. As Commissioner, I'm proud to add former U.S. Army Sergeant Steven Andrew Robison of Kansas City, Missouri, to this season's PBGL line-up.

Well, that's hitting two birds with one stone! Anyway, PBGL for its first season will be employing Project Gotham Racing 3 on Xbox 360. PBGL has a lot of in store for everyone. For details regarding these activities and how to join, refer to the Read link below.

Toys R Us jumps aboard the Wii madness and has released its midnight launch list! The stores that you will find below would be their branches opening at exactly 12:01 a.m. for Wii's launch on November 19. And no, this ain't for pre-orders, honey. This is the real thing!

Now, there will only be EXTREMELY LIMITED (emphasis from them) quantities available, so you might want to get there ahead. Way ahead. Like, make a line outside the nearer selected branch right now.

Anyway, long lines and campouts are nothing new nowadays, especially with the last two of the next-gen consoles finally coming out. For sure, it's gonna be yet another phenomenal display of determination and perseverance to get your hands on the Wii. So, cross your fingers and wish doubly hard that one of your neighborhood stores will be included in their list. Good luck!

Arizona
2820 W. Dunlap Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85051
California
2270 Bridgepoint Pkw., San Mateo, CA 94405
22035 Hawthorne Blvd., Torrance, CA 90503
Florida
330 Brandon Town Center Blvd., Brandon, FL 33511
1645 N.W. 107th Ave., Miami, FL 33172
Georgia
7731 N. Point Pkwy., Alpharetta, GA 30022
Illinois
45 Orland Square Dr., Orland Park, IL 60462
Massachusetts
Northshore S/C (Rts 128/114), Peabody, MA 01960
Michigan
24411 Michigan Ave., Dearborn, MI 48124
Minnesota
14100 Wayzata Blvd., Minnetonka, MN 55305
Missouri
3600 Lindbergh, Crestwood, MO 63127
New Jersey
409 Almonesson Rd., Deptford, NJ 08096
New York
1514 Broadway(at 44th Street), New York, NY
Pennsylvania
275 Clairton Blvd., West Mifflin, PA 15122
Texas
6145 Westheimer, Houston, TX 77057
9500 N.Central Expressway, Dallas,TX 75231
Virginia
6001 Kingstowne Village Pkwy., Alexandria, VA 22315
Washington
103 110th Avenue NE, Bellevue, WA 98004

One of the first things you'll get to do when you go back to (or enter) college is play great games on the Xbox360 and get lessons on the future of gaming and home entertainment. Too good to be true? Nah-uh, this one's for real guys. Thanks to The Game U College Tour.

The Game U College Tour, the country's largest college video game tour, will be bringing the Xbox and Xbox360 to various colleges and universities to educate young minds on the future of gaming and home entertainment. How will they do this? By making college students play some of the best X360 games for free, including unreleased titles! Swee-heet.

The unreleased titles that will be available for the tour include Madden NFL 07, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Saints Row, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, FEAR Combat and America's Army: Special Forces. Other titles to be featured on the tour are Madden NFL 07, NCAA Football 07, NHL 07, FIFA 07, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 07, NBA Live 07, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Splinter Cell Double Agent, Scarface: The World is Yours, F.E.A.R Combat, The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning, Eragon, FlatOut 2, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, America's Army: Special Forces, Saints Row, Project Gotham 3, Arcade Unplugged and Dead Rising.

And if that's not enough, the organizers will even stage a Madden NFL 07 football field goal competition where winners will get to take home $1,000 as a prize. The said tour will go on for 14 weeks and to 40 universities around the country where the organizers expect to reach around 90,000 gaming enthusiasts. Admission is free to all college students and game play is unlimited (!!!). We know you wouldn't want to miss out on this great opportunity so be sure to check 'em out.

The schedule awaits after the jump!

The genetically modified rice, LLRICE 601, that cropped up in in Arkansas poses no health risks, says State Agriculture Secretary Richard Bell. LLRICE 601 was genetically engineered by Bayer CropScience to be resistant to a herbicide. Although it has not received USDA approval for commercial distribution, it was discovered in Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

But Bell said the reports labeling the rice as tainted, bad or contaminated were untrue. "There are no food safety or environmental issues at all...the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration of Washington have assured that they are both safe for food and there is no environmental impact."

It is still not known how LLRICE 601 got into bins of conventional commercial rice, but Bell said it could have been stolen or it got out by accident.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), like the LLRICE 601, are plants or animals whose genetic material has been altered via recombinant DNA technology. Recombinant DNA technology allows DNA molecules from different species to combine into one molecule.

Not everyone is a fan of GMOs. GMO crops and livestock have been nicknamed "Frankenfood" by its opponents because they are viewed as unnatural products of scientific meddling. Others say GMOs could produce unforeseen global side effects as a result of modified organisms proliferating in the wild. Many Western European countries and Japan have banned the entry of GMO products into their territories.

Without it, carbon-based life as we know it on Earth could not exist.

Photosynthesis - the biological ability of converting light into energy - is ultimately what keeps all of us alive. Even when  petroleum (literally, "rock oil") is burned in the form of gasoline, it's just the release of sunlight energy gathered by plants billions of years ago. In a very real way, it is the reason you and I are able to live and breathe. The question that scientists have been wondering about is - just when and where did this process begin?

Meet a humble organism called cyanobacteria. Actually, you know it by its more common name, algae. After studying 15 species of cyanobacteria, a team of scientists at  the University of Osnabrück, Germany concluded that the photosynthetic machinery they use is of a much older form than that of the four other types of  phototropic (literally "light-eating")  bacteria. The team, lead by Armen Mulkidjanian, found that only the cyanobacteria genome contains all 100 of the requisite genes. Many of these individual genes are unique to cyanobacteria. "This means that cyanobacteria have 'invented' the majority of their photosynthetic genes,"  Mulkidjanian states.

Earlier, scientists believed that cyanobacteria was descended from earlier phototrophic bacteria.  This latest research indicates that it was the opposite. The fact that so many of these genes are unique to cyanobacteria indicates that they originated with this lineage.

Additional evidence includes 3.4-billion-year-old fossils that show the oldest photosynthetic organisms as being filamentous (that is, having long, tube-like extensions). This supports the argument that pro-cyanobacteria were the first phototropic life forms.

Pro-cyanobacteria were thus the ancestor of "light-eating" plants able to store unlimited sunlight as energy. This in turn enabled the rise of the diverse biome that exists on Earth today. "This invention gave an enormous evolutionary advantage to cyanobacteria, so that they dominate in the vast majority of photosynthetic communities," Mulkidjanian says.

Not all of the scientific community agrees with Mulkidjanian, however. "I did not see any evidence that would convince me that this group of organisms shouldn't instead be called pro-phototrophs rather than pro-cyanobacteria," says Robert Blankenship of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. According to Blankenship, cyanobacteria's more complex photosynthetic apparatus compared with that of other bacteria suggests that they evolved more recently.

Seems that humans aren't the only ones to suffer ailments like stiff shoulders, easily broken limbs and dimming eyesight as they get older.

As winter descends upon Mars' Southern Hemisphere, NASA's rovers appear to be entering the winter of their lives as well, suffering from problems stemming from aging hardware. Nonetheless, they're continuing to make new discoveries about the Red Planet.

Spirit, stationed about 15° south of Mars' equator (roughly equivalent to northern Brazil and central Africa on Earth), is starting to slow down because it's receiving less sunlight. Opportunity is closer to the equator, so experiences less seasonal variation in light. Despite the age-related problems they are expecting, they have performed beyond all expectations; they were originally designed to operate for just 90 days when they landed on opposite sides of Mars two and a half years ago.

Spirit's right front wheel gave up the ghost back in March. The rover team decided  to park Spirit on a rocky slope called Low Ridge Haven for the winter. From this spot, Spirit has continued to examine the rocks and soil around it while measuring the atmosphere's temperature.

Opportunity, like some of us, is suffering from a a stiff shoulder joint - in this case, on its instrument deployment arm. The rover team is trying to avoid exacerbating the problem, using the arm as little as possible. Its anemic performance was a few weeks ago, however, when the wind blew the dust off of its solar panels, allowing them to absorb more solar energy.

Over the past weekend, Opportunity examined a 30-metre-wide crater named Beagle, and is now on its way to an area where the wind has deposited sand and dust in rippled structures. The presence of sand clods indicate the possibility of small amounts of water, according to rover team member Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

Arvidson hopes the site will reveal something of the area's history geologic history over the past four billion years, when several small lakes apparently dried up. He'd like to know how acidic the water was farther back in time on the Red Planet. "That really tells you about habitability," he says. "Most astrobiologists think that life is easier to get started in more neutral conditions." Earlier geologic data indicates that Martian water was very acidic.

In the meantime, click on the picture below to get a better look at a recent image of the Martian surface.