NASA seeks wisdom of crowd for Mars robot missions

NASA is trying to shed any "not invented here" attitude for its next missions to Mars. The space agency announced Friday it is enlisting the help of scientists and engineers worldwide to lay plans for sending a robot to Mars. The planning group's ultimate mission is to send humans to Mars by the 2030s. NASA is organizing a meeting, called Concepts and Approaches for Mars Exploration, at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, in June. Scientists and technologists can submit ideas for papers online, some of which will be presented at the conference. The robotic mission ideas should be geared toward near-term missions, which could start as early as 2018, as well as longer-term goals. NASA hopes the new approach of seeking input from outsiders will generate good ideas and help maintain technical skills in the U.S., the agency said. This August, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity is scheduled to land on Mars and help determine whether the environment is able to sustain life. Next year, NASA will launch the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, a probe to understand the Red Planet's atmosphere. The rover Opportunity, which landed on Mars in 2004, is still operating and there are two NASA-launched satellites now orbiting Mars.

PlayStation Network going down this morning -- for maintenance

Sony says its PlayStation Network will be down today, but those who suffered through last year's security breach should know it's only maintenance this time around. Sony senior manager for the PlayStation Digital Platforms, Matthew Harper, announced on his company's blog yesterday that the gaming and digital media network will be taken down at 6 a.m. PT today and will stay offline for about 13 hours, or until 7 p.m. PT. During that period, the PlayStation Store, PlayStation Home, and online gaming will not be available.

Sony's timing on the outage is somewhat curious. Almost exactly one year ago, the company was forced to take its PlayStation Network offline after it was breached by hackers. During the weeks-long downtime, the company revealed that user data was stolen, including credit card numbers. When the PlayStation Network was restored, Sony made it clear that the service was far more secure.

Man uses Google Earth to find long-lost mother

Sometimes Google Earth can help you find your way home after decades of not knowing where home is. That is what apparently happened for an Indian man who was separated from his family as a 5-year-old. Saroo Brierley tells BBC magazine that he was accompanying his older brother on a train trip in 1986 when he fell asleep and awoke 14 hours later in the notorious slum of Calcutta. Without his brother. At first, he lived on the streets, joining legions of children begging for their livelihood. Brierley would eventually be taken in by an orphanage and adopted by a couple in Australia. "I accepted that I was lost and that I could not find my way back home, so I thought it was great that I was going to Australia," he told the magazine. But as he grew older, the desire to know where he came from also grew. With vivid memories of -- but not the name -- of the town he was born, he started searching the Internet for clues. Brierley multiplied the 14 hours he knew he had been on the train by the average speed of trains in India to determine how far he traveled that night. He then drew a circle around Calcutta based on that radius and eventually determined that Khandwa was the town he was looking for. "When I found it, I zoomed down and bang, it just came up," he said. "I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play." He would eventually make his way to Khandwa and locate a familiar house. His family had moved but he remembered their names. With the help of passers-by, Brierley was taken to the house where is mother lived. At first he did not recognize his mother, who was stunned into silence by his reappearance. She took him by the hand into her house. "She had a bit of trouble grasping that her son, after 25 years, had just reappeared like a ghost." His older brother was not as fortunate; his body was found on the railroad tracks a few months after Brierley disappeared.

How to bring the Start menu back to Windows 8

Still yearning for the good, old-fashioned Start menu in Windows 8? StartMenu7 is one utility that can bring it back for you. Initially designed to replace and enhance the Start menu in Windows 7 and prior versions, StartMenu7 (aka StartMenuX) can pull a similar trick in Windows 8. Designed for a PC or touch-screen device, this utility is available as both a free version and a paid $19.99 pro version, so you can try out the freebie first. After installation, the software displays an icon in the lower left corner of the desktop. Click on the icon, and a traditional Start menu pops up with access to your various programs, documents, folders, and other content. You can navigate through the various folders and subfolders to launch your full array of installed programs. You'll find the familiar Run command, which is always handy. And a Search link brings you to the Metro screen's Search feature. A power control panel gives you access to a helpful collection of options, including Shut Down, Restart, Sleep, Hibernate, Log off, and even Undock if your laptop is connected to a docking station. You can easily resize the menu to make it shorter or narrower and even position it anywhere on the screen so it's closer to or further away from the Taskbar. By default, the utility uses the new Windows 8 logo for its button, but you can change that to the familiar Windows 7 orb, an Apple logo, or even an Angry Birds image. You can also change the skin and color of the menu itself. The free version provides some options to edit the menu by letting you add and remove items. But you'll need the pro version to completely customize the menu. A separate Group Manager tool allows you to add, edit, and remove virtual groups for your different applications. Since the tool's Start menu icon appears in the usual lower left, you may have some trouble accessing the Metro screen thumbnail that appears when you hover in the hot corner. The trick is to move your mouse all the way to the hot corner until the thumbnail appears, then move your mouse up, and then click on the thumbnail to bring you to the Metro screen. So with a little finesse, StartMenu7 can co-exist peacefully with access to the Metro Start screen. I did bump into one glitch where the utility's icon overlapped the Taskbar icon next to it, in this case the shortcut for Internet Explorer. Exiting the icon removed it from the screen, but then I couldn't get it back until I rebooted Windows 8. If you have trouble launching the program from its Start menu icon, you can run it from the Windows System Tray instead. Click on the arrow for Show Hidden Icons in the System Tray and select Customize. Set StartMenuX to "show icon and notifications," and it will always appear to let you trigger the menu.