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."

brumgrunt writes "Should we be worried? As Pixar, with Up, once more proves itself to be home to some of the most original and daring blockbusters on the planet, the news that its next three films are likely to be sequels — with the confirmation of Monsters, Inc. 2 — gives cause for concern. Are commercial pressures catching up with one of our most inventive movie companies?"

Briareos was one of several readers to write with news that TellTale Games, along with LucasArts, will be bringing new Monkey Island games later this year. Tales of Monkey Island will be a series of episodic games released for PC and WiiWare in the coming months, and The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition will be a remake of the original 1990 game, available on the PC and Xbox Live. A trailer is available for the former, and this is what the press release says about the latter: "The development team at LucasArts is bringing the game into the modern era with all-new HD graphics, a re-mastered musical score, full voiceover, and an in-depth hint system has been added to help players through the game's side-splitting puzzles. Purists will also delight in the ability to seamlessly switch between the updated HD graphics and the original's classic look." Grumpy Gamer has a nostalgic look back at the franchise.

Z80xxc! writes "Paul Thurrott's WinSuperSite reports that Windows 7 will include a built-in virtual machine with a fully licensed copy of Windows XP Professional SP3. The VM runs in a modified version of Virtual PC, and applications running in the VM can interact directly with the host operating system as if they were running on the Windows 7 installation itself. While details are scarce for now, it looks as if this feature will only be available as a (free) addon for Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7. Also, a processor supporting hardware virtualization will be required, indicating that this is perhaps aimed more at power users and corporate users, rather than consumers. Microsoft confirmed the feature last night."

Lord Byron II writes "Like Quake III and Zork, Sarien.net has converted and made available many of the earlier Sierra adventure games. Currently, Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry are playable, and more are on the way. They are Javascript-based, and require no Flash. The site's creator, Martin Kool, said, 'To actually allow gameplay, I reverse engineered the original AGI interpreter in javascript. The reverse engineering process has been done before by others, and the best known existing interpreter (Sarien) has recently merged into ScummVM. Due to that, the interpreter mechanics were fairly well documented online.'"

explosivejared writes "Yesterday we discussed the medical scare that physicist Stephen Hawking was going through. Happily, his website has posted a succinct statement that he is being kept for observation, but he is comfortable and expecting a full recovery."

CWmike writes "Microsoft will deliver a release candidate of Windows 7 in about two weeks, the company's Web site revealed Saturday. According to a page posted on Microsoft's partner program site, Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) may be available to paying subscribers to Microsoft's developer and IT services before May 5. Partners will be allowed to download the release candidate on that date, the first Tuesday of the month. 'Partners: If you have a subscription to MSDN or TechNet, you can download Windows 7 RC now,' the page read Saturday afternoon. 'Otherwise, you can download Windows 7 RC starting May 5, 2009.' The link to the download, however, shunted users to the TechNet download page, which did not list Windows 7 RC as one of the available files. This is the second time in just over three weeks that Microsoft's Web site has leaked information about Windows 7 RC. Accidental, or buzz-builder?"