One of the latest entrants into the government spy-services marketplace, Palantir Technologies has designed what many intelligence analysts say is the most effective tool to date to investigate terrorist networks. The software's main advance is a user-friendly search tool that can scan multiple data sources at once, something previous search tools couldn't do. That means an analyst who is following a tip about a planned terror attack, for example, can more quickly and easily unearth connections among suspects, money transfers, phone calls and previous attacks around the globe.

A team of researchers working at the MR-Center of the University Children's Hospital in Zürich has completed a pilot study using transcranial MR-guided focused ultrasound to treat 10 patients with neuropathic pain. "This research demonstrates that transcranial MR-guided focused ultrasound can be used non-invasively to produce small thermal ablations with extreme precision and accuracy deep in the brain," comments Neal Kassell, M.D. The preliminary results in these patients are consistent with conventional therapy — radiofrequency ablation — which is an invasive procedure and involves making an incision in the scalp, drilling a hole in the skull, inserting an electrode through normal brain tissue into the thalamus, and using radiofrequency to create the lesion.

Buying electronic books on the Internet is easy — but so is taking them away. That became clear last week when Amazon.com Inc. used its wireless technology to reach into customers' Kindle e-readers and deleted some e-books written by George Orwell. Amazon, which returned the cost of the e-books, said it made the move when it realized that the publisher didn't have the proper rights to sell the book in the U.S. That didn't satisfy Antoine J. Bruguier, a 28-year-old engineer in Milpitas Calif., who was stunned to find his copy of "Nineteen Eighty Four" missing from his Kindle.

[S]ix men emerged from a metal hatch after 105 days of isolation in a mock spacecraft, still smiling after testing the stresses that space travelers may face on the journey to Mars. They had no television or Internet and their only link to the outside world was communications with the experiment's controllers — who also monitored them via TV cameras — and an internal e-mail system. Communications with the outside world had 20-minute delays to imitate a real space flight.

Hollywood studios and television networks lost their bid Monday for the Supreme Court to block the use of a new digital video recorder system that could make it cheaper and easier for viewers to record shows and watch them when they want, without commercials.