A good night’s sleep is crucial to storing knowledge learned earlier in the day — that much was known. Now, a new study finds that getting shut-eye before you learn is important, too. Volunteers who took a 100-minute nap before launching into an evening memorization task scored an average of 20 percentage points higher on the memory test compared with people who did the memorization without snoozing first. “It really seems...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Another 17 U.S. billionaires, including Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, have pledged to give away at least half their fortunes in a philanthropic campaign led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. A total of 57 billionaires now have joined The Giving Pledge, which was launched by Microsoft founder Gates and investor Buffett in June. The campaign announced the new pledges in a...

      TOKYO – Japanese pop star, one of the country’s best-selling artists of all time, is calling it quits at the end of the year, but not before performing for fans this week in a concert that will be streamed live online. The New York-born singer-songwriter shocked fans when she announced on her blog in August that she would be taking a hiatus starting in 2011 to focus on self-improvement. She hasn’t said if the...

The effect of iPad is huge. NPD data shows the growth of US retail notebook sales is declining since iPad is launched. It’s even going to -4% in August 2010. We can’t say iPad can’t replace the device for you on-the-go anymore, even though iPad still has some limitations when comparing with notebooks or netbooks. Best Buy CEO has also made the comment saying, “internal estimates showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales...

Could 84% of Facebook soon fall into the hands of a web designer (later wood pellet distributor) called Paul Ceglia? It’s unlikely, but to prevent it, Facebook will have to disprove Ceglia’s claims in court. According to the lawsuit (embedded below), filed in the Supreme Court in New York’s Allegany County last month, Paul Ceglia signed a contract with Facebook in April 2003 to design and develop thefacebook.com (Facebook’s ...

Google does not really move away from China. It still owns the ICP license which is required to operate business in China. The trick that Google China redirects the page to Google Hong Kong is prohibited, and Google has tried another trick in order to keep their ICP license. Looks like Chinese government is being nice to Google. They have renewed Google’s ICP license. Google has updated the related blog today and saying “we look...