geekosystem

We've got sexy Einstein, a cheap Kindle version of Watchmen, and Jesse Eisenberg being kind of a jerk, but still kind of endearing in an interview. All that and more in today's Geekolinks.

Yahoo is holding a big media event in New York tomorrow, at which everyone was expecting them to announce they would be buying Tumblr. Instead of waiting for the big event, The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo's board has approved the Tumblr purchase and its $1.1 billion price tag, which will be paid in cash.

Chris Hadfield had us riveted with his stream of updates from the International Space Station. We learned so much about life in space, not just from someone who had been there, but from someone while they were still there. We were a little sad to see Hadfield leave the ISS earlier this month, but we're glad he's back safely, and that he's still tweeting about every step of the readjustment process.

Last night was the finale of this season of Doctor Who and we're now left wanting until the 50th Anniversary special airs on November 23rd. That's going to be a long six months for fans of the show, but thankfully the BBC seems to be dribbling out bits of information about the 50th. They've even released some behind-the-scenes stuff like this clip of Matt Smith and David Tennant having a chat about what it's like to be The Doctor.

During the Balkan wars in the 1990's, an estimated 90,000 land mines were deployed in the region. They were mostly deployed at random without a map of their location, so finding them is a difficult and serious problem. To help find the remaining mines, Croatian professor Nikola Kezic and his team are training honeybees to sniff out explosives.

BBC Books recently put out a set of 11 re-released novels to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. We hosted a giveaway where we let 15 readers pick the book of their choice, and six of the fifteen of you picked The Silent Stars Go By by Dan Abnett. You all made an excellent choice. I read it, and had the chance to talk to Abnett about the book.

There are disadvantages to factory farming. The crowded conditions lead to health risks for the animals. As a result, they're given antibiotics which can lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Oh, and also sometimes there's foam that makes pools of hog poop explode. Farmers don't know the cause of the foam, but they think they may have a solution, but it's not a very good one.

Sure, the Watson Supercomputer is pretty great at Jeopardy!, but IBM thinks it's time to branch out. They're going to be giving software developers access to Watson with a goal to "launch an ecosystem where Watson is a service and you build applications around it," said CEO Ginni Rometty. Could Watson soon challenge -- and probably dominate -- Siri?

What do you do when you get dumped? If you're anything like us, you drop the needle on some of your favorite sad music and feel some feels. A new study shows that listening to sad music really can help you deal with a breakup. Some people might try to tell you to listen to something more upbeat to cheer yourself up, but forget those people. You've got science on your side, mopey.

Today at 12:00 PM EDT J.J. Abrams and the cast of Star Trek Into Darkness will have a Google Hangout with astronauts, including Chris Cassidy, one of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station who recently went on a space walk to fix an ammonia leak on the station. You can watch the whole thing right here, and we even have the details on how you can try to get a question in.

Do you have your own bodyguard? No? Well this flower sure does. It's a Lady's Slipper orchid, and it's on the brink of extinction. Le Jardin de Yorkshire exhibition will be displaying one of the rare flowers, and a team of botanical experts/flower mercenaries known as the Cypripedium Committee have agreed to protect it.

NASA had a press conference earlier today where they announced that the planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has gone into safe mode. It doesn't look great for the mission at the moment, because when engineers brought the craft back to normal mode they found one of its reaction wheels is dead. It's the second of the craft's four wheels to die, which is bad because it needs a minimum of three.

Hey, can we talk for a minute about how great Butcher Billy is at making things that pique my interest? The answer is that he's really freaking great at it. He's mashed up supervillains with real-world bad guys and swapped Batmen. (Batmans?) Now he has a batch of Post-Punk/New Wave Super Friends. Butcher Billy gets me.

People really seem to enjoy music, so Google figured they'd get a little more involved in the music scene. They just announced the cumbersomely named Google Play Music All Access. They were pretty sparse with details, but All Access appears to be for all intents and purposes Google's version of Spotify.

The twin prime conjecture states that there are an infinite number of twin primes -- prime numbers where one prime is two greater than the other. For example, 1 and 3 are twin primes, so are 101 and 103, 881 and 883, and so on. This conjecture has never been proven, but Yitang Zhang believes he has proven there are infinite primes paired with other primes no greater than 70 million more than themselves. Here's why that's kind of a big deal.