Communications regulatorOfcomhas banned three-year mobile phone and broadband contracts in the UK, with the maximum length of contract now set at two years. This is good news for consumers, who may otherwise have been lured into signing 36-month contracts, with the promise of one of the market’s top smartphones with less money to pay each month. But in such a fast-moving market, three years is a long time and smartphones can become obsolete in as little as a year....

3.7 billion year-old rocks from Greenland may hold secrets of life on Earth Hell on Earth Earth is the product of a chaotic early solar system, which is believed to have featured a number of catastrophic impacts between Earth and other planetary bodies. The formation of Earth culminated inits collision with a Mars-sized impactor planet, which also resulted in the formation of Earth’s moon some 4.5 billion years ago. These cosmic clashes are thought to have generated enough energy to melt the Earth’s crust and almost all of our planet’s interior (the mantle), creating planetary-scale volumes of molten rock that formed “magma oceans” hundreds of kilometers in depth....

LinkedIn has started the New Year with a bang, pushing a new marketing campaign which aims to motivate users to get out of the jobs that they hate and start something new. If you are a LinkedIn user, you might have received an email over the past couple of days that detailed how many of your friends on the social network changed jobs in 2010, providing thumbnails of the individuals and inviting you to learn more about them....

320 and Upis aHTML5 Boilerplateextension that gets you to design for the mobile first to prevent the long loading times that come with most responsive design efforts. Responsive web designs usingMedia Querieshave become popular since browsers started adopting the CSS3 media queries specification, but the popular approach begins with designing for the desktop and then adding styles for smaller viewports. What this means is that every time you load a site designed in this way on a mobile device — probably on a slower 3G connection — assets used only in desktop versions of the site are unnecessarily downloaded....

With so many tempting apps and services asking you to sign up to try them, you can end up giving your email address out to hundreds of different companies. What happens when one of them decides to start spamming you, or sells your details on to some dastardly marketing firm? That’s the problem Irish startup33Mailaims to solve. 33Mail offers disposable email addresses. You get unlimited free email addresses to use wherever you like, all of which get forwarded on to your real address....