At last year's Game Developers Conference, Valve really got people talking when they unveiled Big Picture. A new mode for the company's online game distribution platform, Steam, Big Picture would allow users to play their downloaded games optimized for their TV screens. Today, Valve announced that the new mode will launch its beta in early September of this year. Soon, you'll be able to sit back on your La-Z-Boy with a controller in your hands and play your Steam games on the biggest screen in the house. Plenty of people are excited, but most have just one question on their minds: Does this mean that there's a Steam Box around the corner? Read on, good people! Read on.

This may very well be the next big thing in remote-conferencing. A small startup located in Mountain View, CA by the name of Double Robotics is looking to revolutionize the way we communicate in today's world, by strapping an iPad to a Segway. The invention, simply called "Double," is now available for pre-order and will be shipping in early 2013. So what exactly does it do? Basically, it serves as a body double for teleconferences, allowing users to move around in a room, interact with different individuals, and connect with work, manufacturing, or school environments in a new way. So, a CEO can sit in his office in Manhattan and breathe down his branch managers' necks in San Francisco. Find out more and see a video of Double in action after the jump.

When most people think "EA," they think "challenge everything" or "it's in the game;" but EA might be playing a very different kind of game. There have been a number of rumors floating around about an alleged buyout of Electronic Arts, Inc. The story first appeared this morning in the New York Post, which reported, based on unnamed inside sources, that EA is in the early stages of negotiation with private equity firms KKR and Providence Equity Partners regarding a potential buyout. Could this really be happening? Could EA really be sold to an equity firm? Although nothing is certain as of yet, these rumors are certainly making a splash.

I'm not the biggest bug person and I'm not the biggest mollusk person; but I must say, these imaginary insect-mollusk hybrids have a certain air of beauty about them. Finland-based artist, Vladimir Stankovic painted a number of species in the "newly discovered" order known as Cephalopodoptera. All the images are animated .gifs, adding to their strange beauty. We have a full gallery of these strange creatures after the jump for you to enjoy!

We got word today that Reddit now holds the world record for the largest online secret santa game. The site will now take its place in the Guinness Book of Records alongside other greats like the man who rode a unicycle on the mouths of 30 feet of beer bottles and the man who collected his own belly button lint for 26 years. This is Reddit's first and only entry into the record books and we have to ask: Why stop there? There are dozens of records that the community we all know and love could easily set! We have a few in mind.

In a recent study conducted in Portugal, researchers found that children aged nine to ten who spend 75% of their time engaging in sedentary activities, such as watching TV or using a computer, are up to nine times more likely to exhibit poor motor coordination than more active children in the same age range. Not too surprising, right? The researchers also concluded that sedentary activity levels are an independent predictor of poor motor coordination in skills such as balance and jumping. In other words, it doesn't matter if a kid plays in Little League or if the only exercise he gets is walking home from school, he'll still have subpar motor coordination if he spends too much time on the couch.

Denis Medri made seven portraits of Star Wars characters in the style of kids from a 1980s High School movie a la The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off. You have all your standard cliques represented: Preps, racers, punks, and more! These pictures are truly awesome and make you go, "Yeah! Han would totally be the 'bad boy' who always works on his car." That said, my question is this: Would any of these '80s Star Wars kids have actually gone to see Star Wars? Make the jump for a gallery of the rest of DenisM79's pictures and a link to his deviantART page.

Remember CERN? Sure you do! They were the folks with the Large Hadron Collider who discovered that Higgs boson thing back in July. Well, they're at it again with all their science and their 17-mile-long particle accelerator, and they've even broken a world record. CERN's physicists have created the highest human-made temperature in history with their ALICE heavy ion collider, beating the previous record of four trillion Kelvin. ALICE produced a quark-gluon plasma, a sort of subatomic milkshake if you replace the milk with quarks, the ice cream with gluons, the blender with a large ion collider, and the cherry on top with ground-breaking scientific discovery. This is starting to sound less and less like a milkshake. Read on for the full scoop.

A lot of people love chocolate; it's rich, it's creamy, it's sweet, and it's just delicious. However, all that chocolatey goodness comes at a cost in the form of chocolate's high fat content, but thanks to researchers from the University of Warwick, we may soon be able to eat chocolate without guilt. The team found that, by adding fruit juice, chocolate loses up to half its fat, but keeps all the things that make it great.

Zynga has been looking more and more like a sinking ocean liner recently; it's getting sucked underwater, everyone is abandoning ship, and everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. The company took yet another hit on Wednesday when John Schappert resigned from his position as Zynga's Chief Operating Officer after being stripped of his game project responsibilities in a corporate "reshuffling." A number of employees are beginning to think that Schappert might have had the right idea, forcing Zynga to offer its employees a financial incentive to stay. With the ship taking on water, the crew members jumping overboard, and the captain paddling away in a lifeboat, things aren't looking all that great for Zynga.