An anonymous reader writes “Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 21 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Improvements include the addition of multiple social providers on the desktop as well as open source fonts on Android. In the changelog, the company included an interesting point that’s worth elaborating on: ‘Preliminary implementation of Firefox Health Report.’ Mozilla has revealed that FHR so far logs ‘basic health information’ about Firefox: time to start up, total running time, and number of crashes. Mozilla says the initial report is pretty simple but will grow ‘in the coming months.’ You can get it now from Mozilla.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Firefox 21 Arrives
kkleiner writes “A team has launched a crowdsourcing campaign to develop sustainable natural lighting by using a genetically modified version of the flowering plant Arabidopsis. Using the luciferase gene, the enzyme responsible for making fireflies glow, the researchers will design, print, and transform the genes into the target plant. The project, which was recently launched on Kickstarter, has already raised over $100k with over a month left to go.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
The ultrathin, single-fiber endoscope boasts four times the resolution of existing designs and could result in minimally invasive surgeries for studying the brain, detecting cancer early, and more. [Read more] 
In Larry Page’s note moments ago about Andy Rubin stepping down as head of Android to be replaced by Sundar Pichai, he also provided an update on Android device activations: there are now 750 million of them, across smartphones and tablets from 60 hardware makers. This an update on the 500 million figure noted in September 2012 . From Page’s note: Fast forward to today. The pace of innovation has never been greater, and Android is the most used mobile operating system in the world: we have a global partnership of over 60 manufacturers; more than 750 million devices have been activated globally; and 25 billion apps have now been downloaded from Google Play. Pretty extraordinary progress for a decade’s work. And here’s a visualization of how Android has grown, courtesy of Benedict Evans. By many estimates from analysts, Google’s Android is currently the world’s biggest smartphone platform. The most recent figures from Gartner , for example, put it at 70% of the market in terms of recent devices sold. Activations are a slightly more nebulous stat, however, because, as Evans points out, they don’t include, for example, Android devices sold in countries where Google services might get used, such as China. And they don’t count secondary-owners of devices, as you may sometimes get in developing markets. 750 million Android activations implies an active base of somewhere around 675 million, Evans says . “Plus China, of course.” As a point of comparison, iOS is at about 400 million. Analyst Horace Dediu, based on today’s 750-million figure and historical growth, predicts that Android will reach 1 billion activations by mid-August 2013. Last week , Google provided an update on how ebooks and music have been progressing on the platform: there are now over 5 million ebooks and 18 million songs available on Google Play, one year on after it got rebranded from its previous name of Android Market. 
First time accepted submitter halls-of-valhalla writes “Atari was one of the very first video game companies, starting way back in 1972. However, this long-running name that brought us titles like Pong and Asteroids is having major financial issues. Atari’s United States branches have filed for bankruptcy on Sunday. This bankruptcy is an attempt to separate themselves from their French parent which has quite a bit of debt. The plan is to split from the French parent and find a buyer to form a private company.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes “After having Wine to run Windows binaries on Linux, there is now the Darling Project that allows users to run unmodified Apple OS X binaries on Linux. The project builds upon GNUstep and has built the various frameworks/libraries to be binary compatible with OSX/Darwin. The project is still being worked on as part of an academic thesis but is already running basic OS X programs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
dcblogs writes “The U.S. Dept. of Energy has set a goal to develop battery and energy storage technologies that are five times more powerful and five times cheaper within five years. DOE is creating a new center at Argonne National Laboratory, at a cost of $120 million over five years, that’s intended to reproduce development environments that were successfully used by Bell Laboratories and World War II’s Manhattan Project. ‘When you had to deliver the goods very, very quickly, you needed to put the best scientists next to the best engineers across disciplines to get very focused,’ said U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, on Friday. The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research isn’t designed to seek incremental improvements in existing technologies. This technology hub, according to DOE’s solicitation (PDF), ‘should foster new energy storage designs that begin with a “clean sheet of paper” — overcoming current manufacturing limitations through innovation to reduce complexity and cost.’ Other research labs, universities and private companies are participating in the effort.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes “A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare. RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that’s sent by others.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.