sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"

likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."

Another anonymous reader writes with a link to the Inside Higher Education site. Those folks are reporting on Blackboard's 'pledge' not to sue open source projects used by universities and colleges. The Blackboard patent on educational groupware filed last year has come under a lot of fire, with many organizations simply seeking an open-source alternative. This newest peace offering to higher education groups has the Sakai open source consortium more than a little bit nervous. If Blackboard meant to set people at ease, all it has managed to do was confirm to onlookers that it 'wants to keep its legal options open.' Blackboard insists that this new pledge affords universities a number of legal privileges, and is designed to make educators 'sleep easy at night.' Somehow, very few people seem reassured. Update: 02/02 17:34 GMT by Z : Bad first link fixed.

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Steve O'Hear opens old wounds for Flickr veterans. 'An email dropped into my in-box yesterday from Yahoo. Titled "Flickr: Update for Old Skool members", the message went on to explain that Yahoo was discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign-in system and that from March the 15th, all users will be required to have a Yahoo ID to sign-in to Flickr. It was one of those déjà vu moments when I thought, hang on a minute, haven't we been here before?. And of course we have.' Yahoo tried to pull this stunt almost two years ago, after it first acquired Flickr. So why open up old wounds? Yahoo say it is to make the service easier to manage as they add new features, such as localization. Many users are calling this BS, saying it's all about Yahoo marketing its other properties to Flickr's user-base. Much of the criticism is being lead by a prominent user named Thomas Hawk who also happens to be CEO of Zooomr, a direct competitor to Flickr."

Joe Barr writes "Brice Burges explains why and how he created a new free software application, as well as what he learned from the birthing process, in a story on Linux.com. The story provides first-hand insights into the frustrations and satisfactions of developers working on free/open source projects. From the article: 'I'm always disappointed to hear open source project members say that they had "their developer" modify an aspect of the program without ever hearing from that developer or seeing any of the code. This is not progressive.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.