"iPads are becoming more prevalent, more reliable and more viable for locating information," said Acting NSF Director of Public Affairs Dana Topousis. "This application will provide at your fingertips another avenue for sharing and accessing breaking science news."

Content for this application is either produced by NSF or gathered from scientists, college and university press offices, popular and peer-reviewed journals, National Science Foundation science and engineering centers, and funding entities that include government agencies, not-for-profit organizations and private industry. New content is added weekly, with hundreds of images and videos currently available for download. All images and videos can be shared on Facebook and Twitter, or via email. A built-in news feed allows users to keep abreast of breaking stories in scientific discovery as they happen.

The main application screen is laid out in a user-friendly format, providing iPad owners with the top news, videos, images and discoveries from the science community. In the way it showcases science, Science360 for iPad has a unique look - a spherical or 360-degree presentation. The application demonstrates the successful partnerships and platforms NSF has developed with NBC Learn and LiveScience.com as well as Science Nation, to communicate science and technology discoveries to a broader audience.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by the U.S. Congress in 1950 “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare …” Science 360 is available as a free download from the Apple iTunes store here.

Science 360 features spectacular images and video content from NSF-funded institutions in high resolution for download to the iPad. Photo: National Science Foundation

The very fact that virtual possessions don't have a physical form may actually enhance their value, researchers at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and School of Design discovered in a study of 21 teenagers. A fuller appreciation of the sentiments people can develop for these bits of data could be factored into technology design and could provide opportunities for new products and services, they said.

"A digital photo is valuable because it is a photo but also because it can be shared and people can comment on it," said John Zimmerman, associate professor of human-computer interaction and design. For the young people in the CMU study, a digital photo that friends have tagged, linked and annotated is more meaningful than a photo in a frame or a drawer.

One of the subjects said she always takes lots of photos at events and uploads them immediately so she and her friends can tag and dish about them. "It feels like a more authentic representation of the event," the 16-year-old told the researchers. "We comment and agree on everything together ... then there's a shared sense of what happened."

The penchant of people to collect and assign meaning to what are often ordinary objects is well known. "A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff," the comedian George Carlin famously observed. But a lot of stuff that often is cherished is being replaced by electronic equivalents, such as e-books and iPod downloads.

For their study, William Odom, a Ph.D. student in HCII, Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi, an associate professor of design and human-computer interaction, recruited nine girls and 12 boys, ages 12-17, from middle- and upper-middle-class families who had frequent access to the Internet, mobile phones and other technology. The researchers interviewed them about their everyday lives, their use of technology and about the physical and virtual possessions that they valued.

If a house is a place to store your stuff, then a mobile phone might be considered a treasure box that gives you access to your stuff, the interviews revealed. The "placelessness" of virtual possessions stored online rather than on a computer often enhanced their value because they were always available. One 17-year-old participant said she uploaded all of her photos online so that she could access them whether she was in her bed or at the mall. "Obviously, I can't look at them all and that's not the point," she said. "I like knowing that they'll be there if I want them."

The degree to which users can alter and personalize online objects affects their value. A 17-year-old study participant spent a lot of time developing an avatar for the video game Halo and received a lot of comments and input from friends. The original drawings, he said, "are definitely something I'll keep." Accruing "metadata" — online time stamps, activity logs and annotations — also enhanced the value of virtual possessions.

Participants noted that they could display things online, such as a photograph of a boyfriend disliked by parents, which were important to their identity but could never be displayed in a bedroom. The online world, in fact, allowed the teenagers to present different facets of themselves to appropriate groups of friends or to family. Developing privacy controls and other tools for determining who gets to see what virtual possessions in which circumstances is both a need and an opportunity for technology developers, the researchers said.

"In the future, our research will explore what happens when the boundaries of virtual and physical possessions are more blurred," Forlizzi said. "We will look at things like tags and social metadata and the role they play in sharing experiences with family members and peers."

One opportunity for technology developers, the team said, would be creating technologies that enable users to encode more metadata into their virtual possessions. An example might be aggregating an individual's status updates, songs most listened to and perhaps even news and weather information associated with a particular event.

Today’s teenagers often value digital content more than "real toys.” Facebook updates, online music collections, and email threads may be as precious to them as a favorite book was to their parents. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

The books will be DRM-free, which means the titles can be freely downloaded to the iPad. Popular books in the Gutenberg Project include Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

For other book titles, Apple is likely to match the price Amazon charges for its e-books. Apple already has the iBook application, which is capable of embedding video, to download e-books and news content.

While Amazon does not list the iPad, several news sites report that Best Bay stores featuring a dedicated Apple display area will have the iPad available on launch day. Online retailers like Wal-Mart are expected to follow.

To meet the anticipated demand, Apple just signed a $240 million deal with Samsung. The South Korean electronics company will supply an additional 3 million displays for current and future iPad models. Combined with 10 million displays Apple contracted from LG, the total number of iPad displays on order by Apple now stands at 13 million.

Apple plans to tap the Gutenberg Project for DMR-free e-books. Over 30,000 titles could eventually become available on the iPad. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

To be eligible for the award, a person has to be at least 13 years old and needs to be a resident of any of the participating countries that have an iTunes Store. However, each person will be allowed only 25 entries in one day.

In addition to announcing the giveaway, iTunes released a list of its all-time best-selling songs, making that information available for the first time ever. The top song right now is the Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling."

Digital album downloads grew 5 percent in December 2009, down from 10 percent growth in the September quarter and 11 percent growth in the June quarter.

There are now more than 125,000 developers in Apple’s iPhone developer program. The company has sold more than 50 million iPhones and iPod Touch handhelds, according to its last quarterly report. The top download category is games with over 21,000 apps available, followed by entertainment and books.

At this time, real competitors are few. Google’s Android platform, which ranks number 2, has 10,000 applications available for download.