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Ikea is literally supercharging its furniture. The Swedish purveyor of do-it-yourself home decor says it’s debuting a new line of desks, lamps, and tables that will be able to wirelessly charge your phone or tablet. 

The furniture will use the Qi wireless charging standard, which is one of the main competitors in the wireless charging landscape. The Power Matters Alliance (PMA) is another key player, which has its technology in stores like Starbucks and McDonald’s. There’s also the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), which is expected to merge with the PWA later this year, hopefully paring down the fragmentation to two options.

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The device won't ding or beep, as it's not meant to distract you from your daily activities.

Google has revealed eye-popping ideas for a redesign of its California headquarters that symbolize how far the company wants to move beyond its core search business.

Plans submitted Friday to the Mountain View City Council include lightweight block-like structures—not stationary concrete buildings—that can be moved around as the company invests in new product areas. These areas now include self-driving cars, solar-powered drones and robots. Google’s self-driving car team, for instance, has different needs than search engineers, the company said in revealing its plans.

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Eventually, the conventional ways of manufacturing microprocessors, graphics chips, and other silicon components will run out of steam. According to Intel researchers speaking at the ISSCC conference this week, however, we still have headroom for a few more years.

Intel plans to present several papers this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, one of the key academic conferences for papers on chip design. Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr will also appear on a panel Monday night to discuss the challenges of moving from today's 14nm chips to the 10nm manufacturing node and beyond.

In a conference call with reporters, Bohr said that Intel believes that the current pace of semiconductor technology can continue beyond 10nm technology (which we would expect in 2016) or so, and that 7nm manufacturing (in 2018) can be done without moving to expensive, esoteric manufacturing methods like extreme ultraviolet lasers.

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On Thursday security researchers warned that an adware program called Superfish, which was preloaded on some Lenovo consumer laptops, opened computers to attack. However, it seems that the same poorly designed and flawed traffic interception mechanism used by Superfish is also used in other software programs.

Superfish uses a man-in-the-middle proxy component to interfere with encrypted HTTPS connections, undermining the trust between users and websites. It does this by installing its own root certificate in Windows and uses that certificate to re-sign SSL certificates presented by legitimate websites.

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Hewlett-Packard has devised a way to run programs written in the R statistical programming language against data sets that span more than one server, potentially paving the way for large-scale, real-time predictive analytics.

“Historically, big data has been focused on the past,” said Jeff Veis, HP vice president of marketing for the company’s big data business group. The new software will allow organizations to “anticipate breaking trends” by using very large data sets, he said.

While various commercial packages offer ways to run R on computer clusters, HP’s new Distributed R is the first to offer this capability in an open source package, Veis said.

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n-Space and digital Extremes is working on an old-school RPG for the PC with a DM Mode.

Getting health information from “Dr. Google” is about to get a whole lot easier. Google announced Tuesday that fact-checked health information is coming to Google’s Knowledge Graph in the coming days. In practical terms, that means the next time you ask a question like “Is pink eye contagious?” you’ll see an instant answer at the top of your search results similar to what you see with queries for the current weather or word definitions.

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Scientists have managed to slow photons in free space for the first time. They have demonstrated that applying a mask to an optical beam to give photons a spatial structure can reduce their speed.

The tech industry’s most influential companies spent record amounts of money on federal lobbying in 2014 despite a general drop in lobbying by most tech companies. The spending was often directed at areas away from the central business of technology, and it indicates how diverse and powerful major tech companies are becoming.

Google was the top spender, plowing just over US$16.8 million into its lobbying efforts, an increase of $1 million on 2013. Its lobbying covered technology policy issues such as online advertising and data privacy but also touched on the broad range of issues it now finds important, including patents, labor issues, drones, health data, immigration and international tax reform.

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Google has laid the groundwork for its own cellular service by buying capacity on the networks of Sprint and T-Mobile USA, according to news reports.

The sprawling search company would sell the service directly to consumers, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed sources. Tech news site The Information reported on the deals earlier on Wednesday.

Google is heavily involved in mobile through its Android operating system, the world’s most widely used mobile OS, as well as through selling mobile advertising, and is pushing to make more radio spectrum available for wireless services. But the partnerships with Sprint and T-Mobile would bring the company into the cellular business itself, offering Google phone plans directly to consumers.

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There's a new Baldur's Gate game in the works. No, I don't mean Obsidian's spiritual successor Pillars of Eternity. I mean a real, "It's called Baldur's Gate" game. The announcement comes courtesy of Beamdog, the developer that worked on the updated Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition and Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition.

Before you get too excited, it's not Baldur's Gate III. Instead, Beamdog claims the game "will be an addition to the Baldur’s Gate line using the Infinity engine, bridging the gap between Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition."

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The organismal performance assay detects subtle toxic effects by subjecting mice to a relentless, Darwinian competition for food, shelter and mates. If there is a defect in any physiological system, it is more likely to stand out if test animals have to compete for resources, scientists say.

Researchers have been eavesdropping on ‘conversations’ between calves and their mothers — measuring the process of how cows communicate using detailed acoustic analysis for the first time.

A simple potato extract may limit weight gain from a diet that is high in fat and refined carbohydrates, according to scientists. The results of their recent study with mice were so surprising that the investigators repeated the experiment just to be sure.

Long after becoming the first YouTube video to surpass 1 billion views, and mere months after becoming the first video to crack the 2 billion view barrier, Psy’s Gangnam Style has officially become the first video to break YouTube.

Well, YouTube’s hit counter, at least.

YouTube’s hit counter was programmed using a 32-bit integer, YouTube explained on Google+ this week, as the service never imagined a single video racking up more than the 2,147,483,647 views that the code maxes out at. Then Psy happened.

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Polylactic acid is a degradable plastic used mostly for packaging. To meet the rising demand, researchers have developed an eco-friendly process to make large amounts of lactic acid from glycerol, a waste by-product in the production of biodiesel.

Plastic is well-known for sticking around in the environment for years without breaking down, contributing significantly to litter and landfills. But scientists have now discovered that bacteria from the guts of a worm known to munch on food packaging can degrade polyethylene, the most common plastic.The finding could lead to new ways to help get rid of the otherwise persistent waste, the scientists say.

Microbial succession in a sterilized restroom begins with bacteria from the gut and the vagina, and is followed shortly by microbes from the skin. Restrooms are dominated by a stable community structure of skin and outdoor associated bacteria, with few pathogenic bacteria making them similar to other built environments such as your home, researchers report.

You know those street performers that put plates on sticks and make them all rotate at once? I imagine that's pretty hard to do, because you have to pay attention to so many variables at the same time. I say "I imagine" because if I tried it I'm pretty sure I'd break the whole lot of my expensive IKEA dishware.

Dungeons 2 is a bit like those plates, asking you to pay attention to a dozen different things at the same time. Needless to say, I'm terrible at it. The game does provide an interesting (and unique) challenge though.

Two hearts beat as one

Dungeons 2 is actually two games.

Half the game is similar to the original Dungeons, which is to say it's similar to EA's classic Dungeon Keeper. You're lord of a small underground fortress which quickly (with the help of your loyal goons) expands into a massive labyrinth of treasure vaults, breweries, workshops, and other assorted areas to keep your underlings happy, healthy, and productive.

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When people hear another person talking to them, they respond not only to what is being said -- those consonants and vowels strung together into words and sentences -- but also to other features of that speech -- the emotional tone and the speaker's gender, for instance. Now, a report provides some of the first evidence of how dogs also differentiate and process those various components of human speech.

Changes to the "good cholesterol" HDL (High-Density Lipoprotein) can be associated with cardiovascular diseases, researchers report. By developing a new laboratory test, scientists have demonstrated for the first time that the presence of certain proteins in the HDL can lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality.

Centipedes, those many-legged creatures that startle us in our homes and gardens, have been genetically sequenced for the first time. An international team of over 100 scientists today reveals how this humble arthropod’s DNA gave them new insight into how life developed on our planet.