They came, they saw, they conquered. Today, we'll be reporting the finalists for this 9th Independent Games Festival student competition and best mods competition. Much like our readers, we wish them a hearty congratulations for making it into this coveted list.

• TU Wien: And Yet It Moves
• Koln International School Of Design: Ball Of Bastards
• DigiPen: Base Invaders
• Stanford Junior University, a private university regarded among the finest in the world">Stanford University: Euclidean Crisis
• DigiPen: Gelatin Joe
• Guildhall at SMU: Invalid Tangram
• Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy: Opera Slinger
• SungKyunKwan University: Rooms
• Hogeschool van de Kunsten, Utrecht: The Blob
• DigiPen: Toblo

  As for the awardees for IGF's top four game mods:

• Best Single-player FPS Mod: Cut Corner Company Productions' Weekday Warrior mod (Half-Life 2)
  
• Best RPG Mod: Ossian Studios' Darkness Over Daggerford (Neverwinter Nights)
  
• Best Multiplayer FPS Mod: ES Team's Eternal Silence (Half-Life 2)
• Best Other Mod: Ludocraft's Spawn Of Deflebub (Unreal Tournament 2004)
  

The winners for both categories will be awarded a stipend of US$ 500 to help them attend this year's Game Developers Conference. The Conference itself will be held on March 6 to 9 in San Francisco. Finalists for both events will be showing their works at the IGF Pavilion, with one winner being selected from each group for the GDC's IGF awards. The Best Student Game wins US$ 2500, with the Best awardee winning a US$ 5,000 cash prize.

Click on the read link for the full details on these contenders. Also Make sure to catch up on the other awardings for this major event.

When a word like "addiction" is pasted right after the words "internet" and "game", you know it's not going to be all that great. This new article on CNN discusses addiction to using computers and consoles, with a Stanford study recounting just how bad addiction to computing (rather than computers) can get.

Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, head of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic of the Stanford University School of Medicine, mentioned how their earlier poll of people got to them.

As Aboujaoude notes in the article,

We are seeing more people who lost their jobs because of too much time spent surfing the Internet during work. More relationships are breaking up because of spouses sneaking out of bed to check e-mail in the middle of the night.

While this does seem specifically pointed towards just surfing the net, you have to remember that game consoles are also computers, technically speaking. Previous reports have mentioned that symptoms of addiction have shown themselves when gamers play, and let's not forget the personal accounts of people who've gotten attached to World of Warcraft.

While computer use still doesn't have the "mental illness" tag on its head, the symptoms do happen to be there. Gaming might be good for us in moderation, if one study is to be believed, but fostering good relationships outside individual pieces of tech will definitely help to keep gaming a venue to have fun rather than a place to get a fix.

Xfire finally unveiled the winners of their World of Warcraft Summer Movie Contest last night at a special Machinima event and screening at Stanford University (special because I didn't get invited). The winners, who were chosen by the WoW gaming community, Blizzard, and Xfire from a multitude of entries from around the world, each got to take home a portion of the total US$23,000 pot.

The contest was started to give recognition to outstanding Machinima movies. According to Xfire CEO Mike Cassidy, "Machinima is an extraordinary new art form that allows anybody with time and talent to create great works of entertainment which can be instantly distributed to a global audience."

The finalists for the contest got viewed over one million times on Xfire, so just imagine how many views the overall winners got. Anyway, the winners from each of the contest categories are as follows:

Best Overall & Best Drama/Action
Jason Choi
"The Edge of Remorse"

Comedy
Ryan and John Ebenger
"The Brother's Tauren 2"

Music Video/Dance
Brandon Dennis
"The Anti-Elf Anthem"

Short Film
Jun Falkenstein
"The Ballad of the Noob"

Don't forget to check out the movies. We especially recommend "The Brothers Tauren" and "The Ballad of the Noob." Those two are definitely laugh-out-loud funny and deserve a few viewings.

A study on mice has shown that the protein calceneurin regulates 10 genes that are associated with diabetes. The Nature Study conducted by a team at Stanford University makes possible the creation of new treatments.

In diabetes, the beta cells in your body produce too little insulin (sometimes none at all), and this prevents cells from absorbing needed sugar. The sugar accumulates in the blood and damages your blood vessels, your kidneys, and even your eyes.

Here's the clincher which made the team feel their study was important: immune-suppressing drugs, like those taken by people who are about to go through major operations, greatly increase the risk of diabetes. The team found out that the drugs cause a stranglehold on the protein.

This is what the team did. The researchers bred mice that produce calcineurin in the pancreas only until the mice were born. After birth the pancreas in each mouse stopped producing the protein. By 12 weeks, the mice which were born with a normal number of beta cells, were diabetic. Why? Well, cutting the calcineurin supply prevented the beta cells from increasing in number as the mice grew. The more body mass you have the more beta cells you need. Apparently, "not enough beta cells" equals diabetes.

Researchers hope that production of drugs that enhance the activity of calcineurin could develop a new form of treatment for Type II diabetes. I wonder if the mice weren't really being experimented on, and if they were just probably trying to tell us something (sorry, a little Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy humor there).

By "terminate", we mean put an end to the practice of leaving animals inside unattended vehicles. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a bill that makes it a crime for pet owners to leave their pets alone in vehicles, where they could die from overheating during hot weather. The penalty for the crime would be a $500 fine and/or six months in jail.

According to the Stanford University School of Medicine, temperatures inside cars rise dramatically even on mild days. Even if outside temperature is as low as 72 degrees, a car's interior temperature heats up by an average of 40 degrees within an hour. The study also showed a cracked window had no effect on the rate of heating and the final internal temperature after an hour.

Pets are susceptible to overheating because most animals, like dogs, are designed to conserve heat and do not  have sweat glands to help cool them down. And unlike their owners, pets can't roll down windows, turn on the air conditioner or open doors so they can leave the vehicle.

We think offenders should also be forced to talk like the Governator for another six months as part of the punishment. That should teach them a lesson.

Sony steps up for some corporate responsibility as it teamed up with Stanford University's Folding@home project, and all this in order to harness the PS3's technology to help study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly.

Using a powerful new processor called the Cell Broadband Engine, PS3 is able to run highly realistic games like Metal Gear Solid 4, Full Auto 2, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07. This chip is the same one IBM is using in its supercomputer project for the Department of Energy. This supercomputer is said to be able to reach speeds of one petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Because there is so much horsepower in this chip, Sony thought that it might be a good idea to use it for something else. This time, something that could benefit not only gamers, but the whole of mankind as well.

How does the PS3 exactly fit into the scene of medical research?

Well, in observing the process of folding, or that where proteins start out in the body as long as strings of amino acids and have to assemble themselves into complex shapes, it is rather difficult for scientists to observe this because proteins are so small and the process is so fast--about 10 one-millionths of a second, in fact.

Now, scientists use computer simulation instead, But it takes about a day for a computer to simulate a nanosecond, so it would basically take about 30 years for that computer to complete one simulation, and that's a really long time. To be able to make this faster, Folding@home uses a network of about 200,000 personal computers to simulate how proteins assemble themselves! Heck, a network of 10,000 PS3s would run even faster! Vijay Pande, leader of the Stanford Project, says that a network of 10,000 Playstation 3s would increase speeds by a factor of five, and 100,000 would be 50 times faster than what they can do today. "It turns two years into one month, and that's a huge thing for us."

To participate, PS3 owners need only to download a program into the console's hard drive. Then, when they're not playing, they just need to leave their machines on. The Folding@home team will then divide their complex calculations into manageable chunks and then send it to the participating machines. But don't worry, since the program won't run when someone is using the PS3 since it might bog down the game. "What we want is for people to just have to make the decision to contribute electricity and benefit mankind."

Protein formation is important as improperly-formed ones are linked to a number of diseases, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gherig's disease), and mad-cow disease. So now, everytime you use your PS3, you're not only using it for entertainment, but more importantly, you're contributing to significant medical research that can cure diseases. See, there's goodwill in gaming, just as it should be.

The environment operates on a clockwork schedule and any delay can throw the system off-balance. If a climate change affects the timing of plant growth, it could have a great impact on animals who depend on them, and ultimately on people themselves who depend on crops and livestock to live. Researchers say that this is a likely scenario.

The findings are part of the Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment which was conducted by Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology. The study simulates how the California grassland ecosystem may respond to climate changes predicted to take place a century from now.

Under current climatic conditions, grasses flower early in the growing season and wildflowers flower later. But under conditions simulating a future climate with higher carbon dioxide, grasses and wildflowers bloomed at the same time. This could have devastating effect on animals. "In the natural world, species have evolved to be finely attuned to the seasons—timing is everything. If climate change alters the timing of plant activity, then it could have a domino effect, impacting the feeding, breeding or migration patterns of the animals that rely on particular plant species" the researchers said.

Remember the unwritten rules we usually have in the real world (no groping of people we don't know, no invading of personal space, no running around naked like a fool)? Researchers have discovered that some of those unwritten rules have followed people online.

Nick Yee and fellow researchers at the University of Stanford looked at the inhabitants of Linden Lab's Second Life to see if the online game's users behaved like people in the real world. Using a program to monitor 1,600 avatars and their social interactions, they concluded that certain social rules have entered into online interactions. For example, male avatars tend to stand further away from one another, and people who interacted in their study had the tendency to reduce their eye contact with people by shifting to one side.

What does this do for scientists? For starters, if it can be determined that people's interactions in a game like Second Life are much like the interactions of people offline, certain online games would be an alternative yet reliable place to acquire social data. Yee and company also mention that the game could very well have a far more diverse pool of individuals to work with.

The only difficulty is in finding out which kind of social concepts travel from the real world into the game world. Risk, for example isn't as big a deal online, and thoughts of death in-game are more of minor inconveniences than the "end" that we know of in real life. This study, at the very least is the first step towards knowing more.

As for gamers, it helps if you're observant. You may just find out that the way you act online can be more or less like the way you act in the real world... so we better learn to behave!

Let us sum up the problems with voice recognition in this day and age with a quick quote. Chris Tucker said it best in the movie Rush Hour when he asked Jackie Chan, "DO YOU SPEAK-A ANY ENGLISH?"

Voice recognition technology has always been hampered by the chips that use them. In this case, there still hasn't been a hardware development that allows for all the necessary software to take the technology forward. This is especially true for mobile phones and PDAs, which have a lot less physical space to put voice recognition software on as opposed to computers.

Luckily for us, there's a team at Carnegie Mellon University that's trying to solve these problems. Their solution: putting all the necessary software on a new chip, in much the same way we have graphics cards on computers. At the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, they presented the results of their In Silico Vox project: a working prototype chip that can already recognize 1000 words. They expect to put a lot more in by next year.

What does this mean for the future? A lot more accessibility for people who don't have the means to type, for one thing, as well as greater ease of use for people on cellphones. Instead of the distracting and potentially deadly habit of scrolling through your phone while driving, this should allow for people to tell their phones what to do. 

More importantly for the world, once we find a way to transform normal people's clothing into spandex suits that increase its wearer's natural abilities and serve as protective armor, we can combine the technology with the result of the In Silico Vox project to let this new technology be accessed by some kind of special morphing technology. This mighty technology will allow those men and women to morph into people of great power, and it would be best if we got some Army Rangers to use it for the good of mankind! Go Go Army Rangers!

There are only two places where sponges belong: the kitchen and in Bikini Bottom. If you just received news that there's a sponge inside your body cavity a month after undergoing surgery, you've hit a litigation jackpot. But seriously folks, a sponge or any other foreign object accidentally left inside a patient's body isn't funny. Unless the patient is your mean boss then it's hilarious. (Just kidding, boss).

According to a study in Massachusetts, one out of 10,000 surgeries involved foreign objects left in the body. In another study, removing the objects added four days to an average hospital stay. In 2000, 57 people in the U.S. died from this. Two-thirds of all objects left in the body cavity were sponges.

How are sponges and other object left behind? Current tracking procedures involve a baseline count before surgery begins. A second count is made before the surgeon begins sewing the incision. The final count is conducted before closing the skin. If things dont add up, well, call your lawyer.

But the days of left-behind sponges could be over. A preliminary study at the Stanford University School of Medicine says RFID (Radio Frequency Identification ) chips could help surgeons keep track of instruments and gauze sponges during medical procedures. The RFID tags attached to surgical sponges can keep track of their location in the body before the end of the operation.

In eight surgeries at Stanford, involving consenting patients, a surgeon inserted one or two of the tagged sponges while the patient's incision was still open. Another surgeon kept track of the sponge using a prototype 12-inch wand attached to a device to detect the sponge while the other surgeon held the incision closed. In the bloody test runs the surgeon located the inserted sponge or sponges in less than three seconds with 100% accuracy.

The researchers think RFID tags can be used to track all surgical items and supplies throughout a surgery although the technology needs more polishing. "The technology to achieve this is not there yet because tagging a small pair of steel scissors, or even a small sponge, has not been entirely worked out," the team said. The tag might also interfere with the use of some instruments.