Kinect was an ambitious project from the start, so it’s good to see that Microsoft is following through by continuing to support the device and doling out more functionality. One of the big steps was the release of Kinect for Windows, which allowed a whole new crowd of would-be developers take a crack at the hardware, and now they’ll have a new thing to take a crack at. After an SDK update, Kinect now has facial-tracking capabilities, so it’ll be able to tell if you’re enjoying playing with it.

Those that have congenital deafness have hearing loss present at birth. The majority of these cases are due to genetic issues, though it’s possible for environmental factors to play their part in causing deafness. These are all fairly well-known and accepted facts in the scientific community, but what does comes as news is the fact that our touch sensitivity is linked directly by our genes to our ability to hear.

We all have to make tough decisions, and it’s never easy. According to a new study in Psychological Science, it can be a little easier if you know a second language, and think in that one when trying to make a rational decision. Along with your rational, fact-based thinking, there’s a sneaky side of your brain that pushes all kinds of emotional buttons regardless of what the facts may be. If you’re thinking a language other than the one you grew up with, however, that sneaky side has much less of an effect.

Did you know today, April 25, is the perfect day? If you don’t, you’ve probably never seen Sandra Bullock as an FBI agent go undercover as a Miss United States candidate. Enjoy your perfect day, everyone.

Finally, the written word may have conquered all possible lighting scenarios. The new Nook Simple Touch is available for pre-order today and it has both an eInk display and a front-lighting feature dubbed “GlowLight,” making it arguably the first eReader to be totally usable both in direct, glaring sunlight and also in the absence of any other light source. About time, am I right?

Not too long ago, YouTube rolled out its in-browser video editor, boasting features like color correction and shake compensation. And while that was all well and good, in order for users to get the most out of these features, they’d have to actually use them, and – presumably – have the slightest idea of what they’re doing. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case. YouTube’s latest editing update, Video Manager, will identify the problems with your video on its own, and then fix them, all with the click of a single button. You no longer have an excuse.

Sometimes traditional input devices just don’t cut it. I’ve never been big on the touchpad mouse, but sometimes using a traditional mouse can be annoying when you can’t spare that whole hand because you need it on the keyboard. For typing, you guys. Particularly, activities like peddling between tabs in Chrome can be obnoxious while typing. Especially if you have a dozen open. The same goes for highlighting text. It’s a small annoyance to grab the mouse and then go back to the keyboard, but it’s a very common one. That’s where the foot pedal mouse comes in. It can solve all those problems for you, that is, if it’s at all usable.

Spider silk is known for having a high tensile strength, high elasticity, and being able to maintain both of those qualities even in cold temperatures. As a result, it could have wide applications in things like ligament repair, and even biosteel, but who would have thought that it could also be great for violin strings? Shigeyoshi Osaki at Nara Medical University in Japan did, and after studying spiders and their silk for 35 years, he’s managed to figure out a way to create sets of spider strings. Why would you do that? Well, they sound really, really good.

Sure we’ve got our futuristic tablet PCs and 3D televisions and body-tracking cameras, but this “future” we’re living in still seems a little lacking. Maybe it’s because the present is always boring or maybe, just maybe, it’s because there isn’t any widely available, consumer-grade holodeck-style technology out there. Probably the latter. The See-Through 3D Desktop developed by Jinha Lee and Cati Boulanger, former intern and researcher respectively, at Microsoft Applied Sciences gives the old desktop PC a striking VR twist, but its not consumer-grade, yet.

In the arms race between crackers and publishers, crackers seem to be winning because a pirate copy of nearly every game — even those with insane DRM — usually winds up online. Starbreeze, the company behind Syndicate, seem to be using this to their advantage in a weird sort of way by including a .nfo file asking the inevitable pirates “Hey, why don’t you apply for a job here?”