Google's Chrome: Taking Aim at Microsoft and the iPhone, Jul 07, 2009

No, Google's move into the operating-system space, long dominated by Microsoft, is not good news for Redmond, Washington. The last thing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer needs is to compete against Google's (presumably) free operating system, which supposedly can drive anything from a netbook to a PC.

King penguins are supposed to be a wildlife success story. The flightless Antarctic bird — the second-biggest penguin after its movie-star emperor cousin — was hunted into near-extinction by sailors in the 19th century, who used their fat as cooking oil. When the slaughter ended — penguin fat no longer being the preferred way to simmer your cruise dinner — the penguin bounced back, and today numbers about 2 million. This is a healthy, robust species that sits near the top of the complex Antarctic food web.

Linus Torvalds was just 21 when he changed the world. Working out of his family's apartment in Helsinki in 1991, he wrote the kernel of a new computer operating system called Linux that he posted for free on the Internet — and invited anyone interested to help improve it.