Best Buy has agreed to purchase Napster Inc. for $121 million, which values Napster at $2.65 per share. Like many of us, you might be wondering why Best Buy wants the once relevant Napster. According to Best Buy, they intend to use Napster’s assets to reach new customers with an enhanced experience for exploring and selecting music as well as other digital entertainment products over an increasing number of devices. Um, okay. Best Buy doesn’t have any plans to relocate Napster’s headquarters in Los Angeles yet, and they have no plans to make significant changes in personnel. I guess they just felt like shopping.

Looks like the folks over at Electronics Weekly have launched a search for the best Electronics blogs, with their first ever Electronics Blog Awards and they were kind enough to mention us by name. Now normally we don’t pay much attention to politics. For instance we won’t ask you to Rock The Vote, and we don’t care if you vote for the young hip guy whose face adorns the DS above or the old guy trying so hard to be hip with his corded phone. But when it comes to tech and assorted geekery, we want your vote.

So if you’re a fan of the ‘Brick just hit the link below and follow the instructions to get us nominated. We can’t say we stand for change and we have no Moose-shooting VP, we just really really love gadgets!

In what is probably the biggest physics experiment in history, today marks the first successful test of the Large Hadron Collidor in Geneva by sending a beam of protons through the the entire underground ring that makes up the world’s largest particle collider. The beam sent through travels through the 17 mile underground ring and nearly the speed of light and can make 11,000 laps through the tube every second.

Officials with CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) dubbed the test a success today and the next step will be to send a beam of protons through the tunnel in the opposite direction. Today’s beam went clockwise and the next trial will be to send the beam counter-clockwise.

If successful then the team will be able to work towards the ultimate goal of sending protons through the tunnel in both …

Sick and tired of waiting for Bruce Wayne to market one through Wayne Industries, students at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have designed a winged flight-suit very similar to Batman’s outfit. The suit could allow humans dropped from airplanes to glide on their own just like the Dark Knight. First they estimated the size of the wings and tail needed for stability and how strong they would have to be to stand up to the drag forces they had calculated.

Interestingly, after wind tunnel tests, they discovered that flying in a “Superman” position would be impossible due to drag. Which really sucks because I had my blue pajamas all ready to go and the Superman position is really cool. It took about 100 trials, but they finally refined their original design into what they think is the perfect model and finally concluded that it would take a special kind of guy to use it. Either Batman himself or a super fit pilot who could comfortably wear the suit and use it to its fullest. It’s great news and all, but I’m bummed about the whole Superman thing.

The title says it all. Prisoners at any jail are not the brightest crayons in the crayola pack, but the prisoners in this jail really prove the point. Prison guards at Camp Jail were doing their daily clean up when they discovered that 37 prisoners had hidden mobile phones in their bodies. 30 of them were able to remove the phones without hospital treatment, but 7 members of this think-tank required surgery.

Although this is the largest single incident of this type prisoners often get caught with hidden phones - last year a UK prisoner required over 200 stitches and needed part of his bladder removed during surgery to remove a particularly large handset from his rectum.

According to the World Health Organization, glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide. Glaucoma is basically a build-up of pressure in the eye. It can not be permanently cured. Now researchers at UC Davis have designed a special kind of contact lens that can measure pressure build up in the eye and they’ll even give you a warning if anything is wrong.

These smart contact lenses use an organic polymer called PDMS that acts like a pressure sensor. UC Davis says that they will start clinical trials of these lenses in humans very soon. But this isn’t the end of the breakthrough, they’re also working up to one that will dispense medication automatically.

This isn’t a gadget of course, but it does involve one of our favorite retro arcade games, Space Invaders. We love Space Invaders here at the ‘Brick and we’re a little jealous of our friends in Japan, where these Kit Kat bars are being produced in limited editions by Nestle for Taito arcades to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Space Invaders.

Putting Space Invaders on a Kit Kat should make it a bit easier to fend off the invading armada as you savor every delicious bite of their little bodies. I’d love to see more retro arcade candy bars hit the market, like a Pac-Man Reese’s cup and the like, but I wouldn’t be able to resist and I’d become a large geek instead of a trim geek.

I remember Mad magazine. The fold up joke page. The bad humor. Apparently it’s still around and going strong, has Circuit city pretty pissed off even. In this month’s issue of Mad Magazine, there’s an ad parody for Circuit City that reads Sucker City!. The parody takes aim at the electronics retailer and maybe says what many people were already thinking.

Like how they are always across the street from a Best Buy, Expensive TVs and how the price always goes up right after you bought them. Circuit city is not happy and ordered that all copies being sold at their stores be destroyed. I really doubt that anyone buys Mad Magazines from Best Buy anyway. In the ad you’ll also notice the Wii Epilepsy bundle with optical disc and bitestick controller.

Many of us go to extreme measures in order to keep pests out of our homes. Normally they’ll head straight for any crumbs that you’ve left on your floor or just blindly enter your dwelling as if for no apparent reason. They are easy enough to take care of. Start stomping or call in the verminators. But what do you do when insects start invading your tech?

One couple started noticing ants on their computer desk. They couldn’t quite figure out where they were coming from. There didn’t seem to be a problem anywhere else nearby. As you can see in the video, the work area is very clean. So the wife discovers that the printer isn’t working. The guy checks it out and finds that a small invading ant army had taken up residence in the scanner area. Pretty weird and makes you wonder where else they are that you don’t know about.

Remember the gadget vending machines we told you about in Macy’s? It seemed pretty obvious at the time that the trend would continue. Check out this Best Buy vending machine spotted in the Dallas/Forth Worth airport, keeping flyers in gadgets and sucking up money like a black hole in a square box.

Travelers are always forgetting their gadgets or breaking them, even losing them. Which is why these machines are a smart idea. The machines are in several terminals, insuring that an iPod leaves on every flight. Expensive spur of the moment purchase? Sure. Gadget addiction ain’t cheap.

We entered the Politically Correct or PC age sometime in the 90’s, and the effect that it has had on censorship, whether blatant or mild, continues in one form or another to this day. Take the above image for instance. Moronic as it may seem, the cigarette in the hand of the man in the Mad Men promotional image was digitally removed when it was placed on iTunes.

Apparently Apple thinks that anyone who sees (a rough poster outline) of a man smoking, will begin smoking a pack a day immediately. It proves one thing I’ve known for years: Consumers are not nearly as stupid as those in charge of making such idiotic decisions as whether to remove a cigarette from a TV character’s hand or not. Yeah, people have been having trouble getting their iPhone to work for like a week, but they have the cigarette until control, never you fear.

The supply is expected to be plentiful, nevertheless a line has already begun outside of Apple’s Fifth Avenue retail store to buy iPhone 3G a week before its release. These people are serious and have their supplies for camping. Wouldn’t it be nicer to stay at home with your families?

Part of the line is occupied by some activists known as “Waiting for Apples” who are hoping to set a Guinness World Record and spread the word about sustainable agriculture. They brought their own solar-power generator, yoga mats, a compost bin full of worms, and probably other hippie essentials. Personally, I can’t think of a better way to spend a week then sitting on my ass next to these guys. Yeah, that would just be awesome…

Genetic testing isn’t something you can do in a few minutes. It’s an involved process, requiring special chemicals and instruments that aren’t commonplace everywhere. But now some scientists at Berkeley have created a technique that uses electrostatic tech instead, which simplifies everything.

The DNA is prepared in a lab first and put on a microarray. Negatively charged microspheres are spread across the surface, which push themselves into clumps as they move away from the like-charged DNA areas. It’s an easier and simpler way as well as less costly than current techniques we use now. Apparently the resulting clumps are large enough to be recorded by simple imaging devices like your cellphone camera. It means that in the near future DNA testing could be super quick and accessible.

Researchers at Tohoku University have reportedly figured out a way to “multiply the amount of data that can be stored on a DVD or CD by 9.” Apparently, it works by shaping the pits on a DVD’s surface like Vs, essentially allowing you to get more out of the disc. The problem is that existing DVD & CD players won’t recognize the media made in this way, and for some reason the process can’t be applied to Blu-ray Discs. Still pretty cool though.

The ICT Graphics Lab at USC has created a low-cost volumetric 3-D display that brings Princess Leia one step closer to begging Obi-Wan for help. The system projects high-speed video onto a rapidly spinning mirror. As the mirror turns, it reflects a different and accurate image to each potential viewer.

The rendering algorithm can recreate virtual and real scenes with correct occlusion, horizontal and vertical perspective, and shading. Close to 5,000 individual images are reflected every second within the surface area and create a real-space three-dimensional object. Video below.