Astronomers witnessed the birth of the first intermediate black hole Astronomers have long suspected the presence of black holes larger than those created by stars, but smaller than those at the centers of galaxies. Now, they’ve found one. It’s impolite to ask a black hole its mass One of the bodies involved in this event was ablack holepossessing a mass 85 times that of the Sun. This was, in itself, an unexpected finding — this mass is thought to be unstable, preventing the formation of black holes of this size....

Far back in the days before Windows Phone 7 had launched, Asus was a partner for the upcoming new Microsoft phone line. When the WP7 finally made it to market, Asus was gone. What happened? Asus actually built 5,000 phones in preparation for Windows Phone 7, but when push came to shove the company felt that, according toa report in Forbes, that it lacked the “bandwidth” to take on the new line....

Back in 2010, Tencent revealed a simulation of its web-OS designed for Tablets calledWebQQand if rumors are to be believed, the company is already building a strategic partnership with Asus for new EeePads to carry a standalone version of the operating system. ChinaZreportsthat Tencent and Asus are in a strategic partnership to introduce the QQ operating system to the latter’s latest Tablet PC, the EeePad. The source said that the two companies have already entered into research and development and will soon have the new products available....

We’ve seen similar offerings from Motorola lately in theAtrix 4G, but this convergence of phone and tablet is the first of its kind.Asushas just demonstrated a device that it’s (somewhat unfortunately) calling the Padfone atComputexin Taipei. The idea is that you take a phone, slide it into a tablet-formed “dock” and then continue to use the same device but just in a different function. Once docked, you’ll get the larger screen, some additional battery power and I/O ports but we don’t know any of the fine-point details just yet....

Open? Closed? Garden? Walls? Nobody likes the discussion, butGooglehas found itself smack in the middle of the ideas. With therecent newsthat Google would not yet be releasing the code for the tablet-oriented Honeycomb, many people were up in arms.Asus, it seems, was one of them. Google had stated that it didn’t want developers using the code for “unauthorized ways”. However, due to the fact [parts of] Android is released under GPL, many have argued that Google is not in the position to determine what is and is not authorized....