Our pre-caffeine roundup is a collection of the hottest, strangest, and most amusing stories of the morning.Facebook revealed "Facebook Home," Thursday, a clever little way to overhaul an Android phone ... and turn it into a Facebook phone.The first phone to come pre-loaded with Facebook's new Home mobile home screen/launcher will be the not-coincidentally named HTC First. AT&T will sell it ex...

Two young women born in South Korea, and raised continents apart, discovered each other on the Internet and suspect they are twins separated at birth. The girls launched a Kickstarter project to help fund their reunion and record their first in-person meeting and DNA tests in a full-length documentary. Barely two weeks later, the Internet has funded it past the target goal.Anaïs Bordier and Samant...

By Becky OskinLiveScienceNASA's globe-trotting, remote-sensing plane wrapped up a month-long trip to Central and South America in March, returning with images of volcanoes, Amazon floods and archaeological sites.The small Gulfstream-III passenger plane carries a 10-foot-long (3 meters) radar pod, the unmanned aerial vehicle synthetic aperture radar (UAVSAR). The radar scans Earth's surface with ra...

By Marc LallanillaLiveScienceIt's big, it's hairy and it's venomous.The newest spider to give arachnophobes the willies, a tarantula named Poecilotheria rajaei has been discovered on the island nation of Sri Lanka.With a leg span of 8 inches (20 centimeters) and enough venom to kill mice, lizards, small birds and snakes, according to Sky News, the crawler is covered in subtle markings of gray, pin...

Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the "send" button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade. EdX, t...

By Tia Ghose, LiveScience Scientists have watched a specific network of brain cells light up in rats to create a mental map of their location.The new study, in which researchers looked at brain cells that literally turned on and off like light switches as rats navigated a maze, could shed light on how the brain creates a sense of place.The study is published Thursday in the journal Science.Findi...

People afflicted with severe hearing loss often cannot benefit from garden-variety hearing aids, necessitating complex surgery to install a special implant. But new technology from the Fraunhofer Institute could provide the best of both worlds: Huge improvements and simple installation.Fraunhofer's device is also an implant, but one that is so small and comparatively efficient that it can be put i...

To anyone wondering why Facebook didn't build a Facebook phone, the answer is simple: It didn't need to.Let's recall what Facebook Home is, exactly: Software that launches when you power up your phone, that completely replaces the home screen, giving you a whole new messaging and notifications system. You can still get to your Android apps, by way of a new app menu, and you can still shop for apps...

By Becky OskinLiveScienceA new and rare ice core record of tropical temperatures highlights changes in the enfants terribles of world climate, the El Niño/La Niña–Southern Oscillation.The climate record comes from Peru's stunning Cordillera Oriental mountain range, home to Quelccaya, the world's largest tropical ice cap. Researchers trekked to an altitude of more than 18,000 feet (5,600 meters) to...

By Elizabeth HowellSpace.comA magnetic "solar heartbeat" beats deep in the sun's interior, generating energy that leads to solar flares and sunspots, according to new research.A new supercomputer simulation, described in Thursday's edition of the journal Science, probes the sun's periodic magnetic field reversals. Every 40 years, according to the model, the sun's zonal magnetic field bands switch ...

By Douglas MainLiveScienceCoral reefs may be more independent and resilient than previously thought.New research shows that an isolated reef off the northwest coast of Australia that was severely damaged by a period of warming in 1998 has regenerated in a very short time to become nearly as healthy as it was before. What surprises scientists, though, is that the reef regenerated by itself, found a...

Commercial ventures are planning to send out profit-hunting missions to asteroids by the year 2020 — but in the shorter term, they're bringing in money by developing technologies that may show up on NASA spacecraft before they're put to use commercially.For example, NASA said this week that it would award up to $125,000 to Arkyd Astronautics for a software system that would allow spacecraft to man...

Facebook revealed "Facebook Home," Thursday, a clever little way to overhaul an Android phone ... and turn it into a Facebook phone. Facebook Home will be supported on a variety of Android devices, but first it'll launch on an HTC device incredibly appropriately named "First."On first touch, the HTC First feels like an average Android device. It's not as solid as the gorgeous HTC One, but it's not...

By Jesse EmspakLiveScience An ancient form of life can use an ingredient in rocket fuel for energy, suggesting creatures with this odd ability are more diverse than anyone thought.The new discovery might offer insight into the history of life on the early Earth, and the evolution of metabolisms like ours that use reactive chemicals like oxygen.Called Archaeoglobus fulgidus, today the microbe lives...

While the game industry may be struggling with its transition to next-generation consoles and the rise of free-to-play mobile and social gaming, "Angry Birds" has still managed to make its creator’s profit margins soar past the competition.This week, Rovio Entertainment announced that its revenue for the 2012 financial year grew 101 percent on profits from its iconic "Angry Birds" games, related m...

Just as Facebook announced its latest innovation — a complete Facebook interface for Android phones — the Internet remains abuzz over what could be ancient history for the social network. The personal website of a teenage Mark Zuckerberg may have been unearthed, first pointed out in a post at Hacker News.Dating to at least 1999 (according to the Internet Archive) and fully functional at its origi...

By Tanya LewisLiveScienceThe ability to mimic the facial expressions of others is thought to be linked to empathy. It's known that humans and orangutans "ape" each other in this way, but gelada monkeys appear to do it too, a new study shows.The phenomenon, known as rapid facial mimicry, is an unconscious response that occurs when two animals are interacting. Researchers showed that geladas (Therop...

The first phone to come pre-loaded with Facebook's new Home mobile home screen/launcher will be the not-coincidentally named HTC First. AT&T will sell it exclusively starting April 12. The cost? $99.99.With a 4.3-inch 720p display, 5-megapixel camera and dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chip running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, it's not going to be the biggest, fastest or most up-to-date Android p...

By Mike WallSpace.comNASA's first manned outpost in deep space may be a repurposed rocket part, just like the agency's first-ever astronaut abode in Earth orbit.With a little tinkering, the upper-stage hydrogen propellant tank of NASA's huge Space Launch System rocket would make a nice and relatively cheap deep-space habitat, some researchers say. They call the proposed craft "Skylab II," an homag...