For more than 100 years, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been our best description of how the force of gravity acts throughout the Universe. General relativity is not only very accurate but ask any astrophysicist about the theory and they’ll probably also describe it as “beautiful”. But it has a dark side too: a fundamental conflict with our other great physical theory, quantum mechanics. General relativity works extremely well at large scales in the Universe, but quantum mechanics rules the microscopic realm of atoms and fundamental particles....

News is emerging that Facebook is set to launch a new music service with Spotify. Asreportedon Forbes, the music streaming service could be launched in as little as two weeks, and the integrated service is still going through testing. It’s thought that Facebook users will see a Spotify icon appear on the left side of their newsfeed, along with the usual icons for photos and events. By clicking on the Spotify icon, users will install the music streaming service on their desktop in the background, and will enable Facebook users to tap into the millions of songs in Spotify’s library....

It’s really not much of a surprise. In fact, we’ve seen Facebookmaking advancestoward exporting its comments platform for a few months. Back whenFacebook Groupsgotits makeover, we noticed that comments could be voted up or down, and that a simple enter would post instead of a more time-consuming Submit button click. Now, according toThe Social, the company might be very close to launching a comments platform that can be integrated onto any site....

Last week I attended an event at Facebook for bloggers and journalists. One of the speakers was Andy Carvin, social media guy at NPR and former director of theDigital Divide Network. With nearly 1,500,000 Facebook fans, NPR have some of the best Facebook engagement amongst news organizations in the US and Andy told the crowd how he often asks sources to come forward on Facebook. The most interesting part of his speech was when he talked about the behavior of Internet users when they comment anonymously on blogs versus as themselves on Facebook....

In 1998, when Aaron Greenspan was a freshman in high school he started his first company, Think Computer Corporation. In 2001, he began his studies at Harvard College and created a Web service called houseSYSTEM with a social networking featured, which he called The Facebook. houseSYSTEMpredatesFacebook.com by 4 months and Mark Zuckerbergwaseven an early subscriber. Greenspan retells the story in his self-published book,Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era....