It was revealed yesterday in the New York Times, and now we’ve gotten the official word from The Source: Wonder Woman #600 releases today, with a new costume and a new backstory.

Well, it’s a new backstory in the same sense that Star Trek was a restart.  Literally.

Today, at Wired‘s Disruptive by Design conference, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that, beginning July 1st, Starbucks will offer free WiFi internet access in every one of its American stores.  No time limit, no registration required.

Right now, patrons are only allowed to surf for two hours at a time, and have to have a Starbucks card in order to get access.  By this fall, Starbucks will also be rolling out The Starbucks Digital Network, offering free access to a number of for-pay-only sites to its customers.

Read on...

According to a Wired.com report, there’s a good reason that Pulse, an app providing a slick, simple layout for browsing RSS feeds, has been removed from the app store. This app had been praised by none other than Apple lord Steve Jobs just yesterday morning, and has been downloaded over 35,000 times, Wired reports. For some time, it was the most popular paid app on the market.

The New York Times, though, could not allow Pulse to continue its practices.

Okay, so it’s actually a rather high-tech conveyor belt/laser scanner combination, but still. It’s two-thirds the size of a football field!

The sorter is housed in the newly renovated Library Services building, a renovated warehouse in Queens. The push to automated sorting was made when the Library found it could no longer recruit a full-time sorting staff. The job was just too boring.

Now, according to Salvatore Magaddino, who “oversees the distribution of materials” for the Library, one seven hour shift with the sorter can do an amount of work that used to take two days with three times the staff. This allows the library to turn around all of its returns and branch requests within 24 hours of them being delivered to the Services Building.

In yet another example of real news almost being less believable than The Onion (no really), last week Wisconsin declared that Lactococcus lactis was the official state microbe.

The New York Times reports:

“The first time I heard the idea, I thought, I’ve got more important things to do than spending my time honoring a microbe,” said Gary Hebl, a Democratic state representative who proposed the bill which, he says, would make Wisconsin the first state in the nation to grant such a designation. “But this microbe is really a very hard worker.”

Read on...

The Boy Scouts of America are celebrating their 100th birthday this year with events, an official US postage stamp, a commemorative coin, and of course, the brand new Geocaching Badge.

In case you don’t know what geocaching is (and if you don’t, you should really read this webcomic XKCD), its basically GPS enhanced treasure hunting. Sites like Geocaching.com maintain a database of caches hidden by the geocaching community. Pop in your zip code, and the site will deliver unto you a list of the closest caches, identified only by latitude and longitude. Feed the lat and long into your gps device, and start your search.

The activity combines the best of new technology and the old scouting standby: navigating the outdoors.

In a move that has alarmed app makers, Twitter has acquired Atebits, the makers of Tweetie, the critically acclaimed Twitter app for iPhone and Mac. The $2.99 app has been reviewed in TIME and Wired, and won a 2009 Apple Design award.

Loren Brichter, Atebits founder, weighed in on the Tweetie blog:

It’s been a wild ride since 1.0, and over the last year and a half Tweetie has gone from a no-name app from a little known software company to an app hailed as one of the best mobile experiences around… and I’ve had the privilege of working with the folks at Twitter from the outside as their service evolved.

Now I’ll be working with them on the inside. I’m happy to say that as of today Twitter is the proud owner of Tweetie – and I’m joining their mobile team and starting work on turning Tweetie.app into Twitter.app, for iPhone and iPad.

This marks Twitter’s first foray into providing an official client for its microblogging service.

Google wants to keep you alive. The New York Times reported yesterday that any searches related to suicide techniques will now bring up the telephone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline accompanied by a bright, red telephone icon as the first result on the page. This is the second time that Google has offered a helpful telephone number to go with troubling search terms. A few months ago, the search engine added the phone number for the national poison control hotline when users search terms like “poison emergency”.

At about 11:30 Saturday night, just as Iceland was easing into the day of the vernal equinox, a volcano erupted right next to the Eyjafjallajokull (yes, really) glacier.  Icelandic authorities evacuated hundreds of people from surrounding towns, fearing flooding from the melting glacier.  There have been no reports of injuries or property damage, and so we can say with only a little guilt that this volcano looks awesome.

The fissure is half a mile long and looks like something out of the Rite of Spring section of Fantasia.  Video after the jump:

Today’s New York Times has an extensive article chronicling the growing animosity between Apple and Google. The two companies shared common goals for most of the past decade, when they were both attempting to upset Microsoft’s near monopoly on personal computers and “ensuring that Bill Gates didn’t dominate the frontier of online services and mobile devices.” Their collaboration became more official with the release of the iPhone, which shipped with Google’s search and mapping services at the core of the device.

Now that Google is making its own forays into mobile computing, relations have become strained.

“We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business,” Mr. Jobs told Apple employees during an all-hands meeting shortly after the public introduction of the iPad in January, according to two employees who were there and heard the presentation. “Make no mistake: Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”