If you have a cellphone, you carry it with you everywhere, so you might as well make it do double duty as brass knuckles, right? Who really has the pocket space to carry both an intelligent cellular telephone and everyone’s favorite variety of fisticuff-enchancing brass implements. Well worry no more, because the iPhone 4 and 4s Knucklecase has you covered. For the low price of $99 dollars, you can buy this aluminum — not brass — case and feel safe in your really-not-bad-enough-that-you-need-brass knuckles neighborhood. The downside? The design is hopelessly flawed. You’d be better off hitting evil-doers with a wet fish. Not even a big one. Like a guppy or something.

Everyone’s favorite show about ridiculously attractive people time traveling and also dinosaurs, FOX’s Terra Nova, has been canceled. Though the show had Steven Spielberg and Peter Chernin as executive producers, this isn’t exactly coming as a surprise, as the ratings weren’t ever as attractive as its cast, and the show had a fairly large budget. For fans dismayed at the thought of losing one of the only shows on television prominently featuring dinosaurs, there’s still a bit of hope, as the studio is said to be aggressively looking for another network to host the sci-fi epic.

Despite seeing a 1269% boost when it opened access to everyone, rival to the Facebook throne Google+ has now dropped off a little. According to numbers from Chitika Insights, Google+ has lost about 60% of its active users. While the accounts still exist, they just haven’t been used in ages –like mine for example. This means that although Google+ is populated, it is populated largely by tumbleweeds.

In the beginning, when Google+ was invite only, it managed to garner a lot of attention by being generally inaccessable. Everyone was clamouring for invites and pouring over the features. That exitement appears to have carried over to the public launch date, but not very far beyond. Breaking through Facebook’s strong but-this-is-what-I’m-familiar-with defenses may have proven harder than previously thought.

As you may or may not be aware, ICANN gave its blessing to the .xxx top-level domain a few months ago which means that before you know it, there are going to be a lot of .xxx domains out there. There will not, however, be a lot of celebrityname.xxx domains out there because a whole bunch of our famous friends have been given protection in the form of permanently reserved domains.

For the moment, details are scarce. Neither the list nor the criteria for protection have been publicized, but through some Whois mumbo-jumbo, it’s possible to dig up a partial list. It’s worth noting that, for the time being, businesses will have to shell out a few hundred bucks for the same protection, but no one seems to know if these celebrity protections are pro bono or the result of a similar insurance purchase. Either way, .xxx domains, while lucrative, have to potential to cause a lot of people a lot of headaches so any anti-cybersquatting measures are a good idea.

Partial list of protected domains below.

The world of video games is a magical place. The possibilities are near limitless when everything about the reality that the player inhabits is constructed from the ground up. Sometimes this provides fantastical journeys outside of space and time while other times it can poignantly encapsulate actual reality.

And even further still, this can sometimes lead to introducing rather mundane, normal activities to the lives of the avatars we inhabit. There is most certainly a reason that these actions are included in games. David Cage, from developer Quantic Dream, has gone on record as saying that without the mundane things presented in Heavy Rain, “it would have been impossible for players to really attach themselves to the game’s protagonist and really feel his pain throughout the game’s story.”

So, in short, here is a list of mundane things we do in games in order to more fully connect with the protagonist and their surroundings.

Researchers at Detroit’s Henry Ford’s Department of Public Health Sciences have announced the results of their study looking at allergen output of so-called hypoallergenic dogs. The results are not good for people who have invested in labradoodles solely for their alleged lack of allergens.

According to the study, which will be published online in the American Journal of Rhinology and Allergy, covered some 60 households. Of these, 11 had hypoallergenic dogs. For the experiment, the researchers gathered dust samples that they analyzed for the Canis familiaris 1 (Can f 1) allergen. While scientists found some variation between individual dogs, there was no measurable difference between the so-called hypoallergenic dogs and other canines.

I’ve got good news and a lot of bad news for you. The good news is that a fully licensed Pokémon game called Pokémon Say Tap? will be coming to both iOS and Android devices this summer. That’s all for good news, and it’s all downhill from here.

The bad news is that Nintendo, who own about a third of the Pokémon franchise, maintain that they have no plans on ever bringing a full-fledged Pokémon game to a third-party mobile device. Or any game, for that matter. The worst news is that it’s not even a full-fledged Pokémon game. Yes, there are monsters which are pocket-sized involved, but the forthcoming game is based around card and rhythm-matching mechanics. Perhaps its best that this game isn’t likely to see release out side of Japan.

Interestingly, Nintendo’s continued abhorrence of mobile gaming comes despite a 5% stock bump at the news of a mobile Pokémon game. If money won’t shift Nintendo, then nothing will.

(image and story via MobileCrunch, Engadget)