I.B.M.'s strategy in the storage business has been guided by its research labs spotting future trends.

While the tendency for most people is to run from a hurricane, the folks at NASA don’t appear to share that sentiment. NASA sent a robotic plane into the eye of Hurricane Earl, which is moving toward the East Coast. The unmanned spy plane, called the Global Hawk, took photos both outside and inside the hurricane. The plane also collected data from several of its remote-sensing instruments, such as radar, and transmitted it back to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert, where the plane took off Thursday morning. The Global Hawk is one of three aircraft being used by NASA in its Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes experiment. GRIP is a NASA Earth science field experiment that runs from Aug. 15 to Sept. 30 to better understand how tropical storms form and develop into hurricanes. The Global Hawk is typically used in Iraq and Afghanistan for reconnaissance to find insurgents and weapons depots. It takes off and lands without the need of a pilot's hand. Instead, NASA pilots simply design a flight path on a computer and sent it on its way. Built by Northrop Grumman Corp. in its manufacturing facilities in Palmdale, the Global Hawk flies ...

Apple's entry into social media has created bumps in its relationship with Facebook.

People are increasingly watching YouTube videos on cellphone screens, which could lead to new kinds of videos and advertising.

Ping. Hmm, that sounds familiar. Isn't there another online service with a similar name? Also offered by a huge technology company? That was started in the mid-1970s? Ding ding ding! The Ping-Bing coincidence is surely one of those happenstances of this fast-changing and multifarious world -- one in which many things occur at once and unrelated events often appear connected. But isn't it tempting to think that at some point, in some Apple meeting during which Steve Jobs and company were choosing the name for their new social music service, some smart fellow brought up the major similarity between the working favorite name, Ping, and blood rival Microsoft's upstart search engine, Bing? And that, at that moment, Jobs paused to think, smiled, and said, "All the better!" (Apple declined to comment for this post; Microsoft has not yet responded to a request.) As far as names go, you can't get any closer to Bing than Ping.  For starters, "bing" and "ping" are both onomatopoetic words for short little chime sounds.  And the letters P and B are very close, both phonetically and orthographically. B is just a P with an extra curl on the bottom. And the B and P sounds are the English language's ...