If you’ve been on an Amtrak train in the past 40-odd years, you know the routine. Have your ticket out, wait for the conductor to come and use his hole punch on it before placing it above your seat. That will all be changing soon, as the government-owned rail corporation prepares to roll out iPhone-based electronic ticketing across its routes.

It’s 2012, and although we may not all own flying cars and hoverboards, or be universally treated by horrifying robot doctors, we will soon have a bluetooth toothbrush with its own smartphone app, a bluetooth toothbrush that is also blue; it’s a blue bluetooth toothbrush, a bluetoothbrush or “bluthbrush” if you will. Ain’t that a mouthful?

Your smartphone already knows a lot about you at any given time, like where you are, whether you’re moving, if you’ve been emailing or texting a lot, or if you’re missing a lot of calls. But is this enough information to, say, diagnose depression? Researchers at Northwestern University are aiming to find out with the app Mobilyze! which hopes to do exactly that.

Late last year, Google’s Chrome browser finally overtook Firefox in global usage. Now, Chrome is making new strides in its quest for dominance and coming to Android. For the moment, it’s still in beta and relatedly only available for Ice Cream Sandwich users, but even so, it looks pretty sweet. Along with speed increases and better UI, mobile Chrome intends to make good use of its desktop sibling.

If you just can’t keep up with what Mars is doing these days due to the hustle-bustle of your awesome, exciting, too-busy-for-Mars lifestyle, has NASA got the thing for you. Presenting: An iPhone app that sends new pictures of Mars directly to your phone, so you can still be that amateur Martian hunter you’ve always wanted to be, while being an adult and grabbing a coffee on the way to do spreadsheets at the office.

While the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, continues to snake its way through Congress, some citizens are attempting to take their concerns to the companies which support the legislation. For instance, a recent boycott of GoDaddy resulted in a surprising about-face for the company. However, the designers of the Boycott SOPA app for Android want to take it a step further. Using the app, shoppers can quickly weed out products from companies which have thrown their support behind SOPA. 

There seems to be no end of possibilities for Apple’s iPad tablet: You can explore stonehenge, Orangutans can play with it, cats can slice fruit with it, and you can fake a grievous bodily injury with it. Now, you’ll apparently be able to help run a government with one, too. At least, that’s the plan for British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is having a specially made “government dashboard” app developed especially for him.

Stonehenge has been mystifying people for quite a long time, but getting to the massive circle of standing stones could pose a problem for many. Happily, the Stonehenge Experience app for iOS tackles this problem with gusto, aiming to bring you the sights and even the sounds of Stonehenge regardless of where you may be.

Rich Jones over at Gun.io recently came across the official Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Heat Safety app on the Android marketplace. This all sounds rather hum-drum, and really, it is. The app is pretty dull, providing some heat safety tips, a heat index converter, and the ability to pull down information from NOAA’s weather database. Apparently, it doesn’t do all of those things, but that’s not too surprising — bad apps aren’t exactly news.

The real surprise came when Jones filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request through Muckrock.com, and discovered that the app — which is not exactly in working order — cost nearly $200,000 to develop.

I understand the appeal of collections, especially big, full collections. So does Thomas Park, because he got together a collection of pictures of all the Apple stores and threw them into a neat, scrollable gallery. In a post on his blog, Park talks about the first time he saw the Tyson’s Corner, Virgina store, the experience which ultimately led him to his quest to corral all the Apple stores into one place.