Google announced the winners in its first Science Fair -- three young women who could someday cure cancer, build flying cars or become the CEO of a giant tech corporation.

The 15 science-fair finalists put their projects on display at an exhibit hall in Google headquarters Monday. More than 1,000 onlookers came to check them out.

But in the end, the judges had to pick three winners, which Google announced in a blog post Tuesday.

In the 13-to-14 age group, Lauren Hodge won for her project studying how different sauces potentially affect carcinogen levels in grilled chicken.

In the 15-to-16 age range, Naomi Shah tried to prove that tweaking the environment indoors can improve air quality and lessen people's reliance on asthma medication.

The Grand Prize winner (and champion in the 17-to-18 age group) was Shree Bose, who found "a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients when they have built up a resistance to certain chemotherapy drugs," the blog post said.

"This year was all about girl power," Google declared.

"Our judges said the unifying elements of all three young women were their intellectual curiosity, their tenaciousness and their ambition to use science to find solutions to big problems," Google said. "They examined complex problems and found both simple solutions that can be implemented by the general public — like changing your cooking habits or removing toxins from your home — as well as more complex solutions that can be addressed in labs by doctors and researchers, such as Shree’s groundbreaking discovery, which could have wider implications for cancer research."

The winners took home a good haul. Grand-prize winner Bose won a $50,000 scholarship, a trip to the Galapagos Islands and an internship at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. Hodge and Shah took home $25,000 each in scholarships and internships at Lego and Google.

For info about next year's Google Science Fair, click here.

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Photo: Winners (from left): Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose and Naomi Shah. Credit: Google

Google began rolling out an update to the Android Market on Android phones that gives the app storefront a new look and adds movies and books.

The new user interface should make it easier for users to find relevant content with more lists of available apps, games, movies and books that are country-specific -- such as new releases, top paid, top free, top grossing and other options in sorting what's for sale.

To view different lists, all a user has to do in any section of the Android Market is flick a finger left or right, making navigation easy and fairly intuitive.

Google has also added more information to the detail pages for each app sold, with an app's name and price along the top of a listing; a side-scrolling row of screen shots below that; and an app's description and reviews further below.

The page will also feature a thumbnail to a product video for apps or other content that offer such a preview.

Google began updating the Android Market on phones Tuesday for those running Android 2.2 (also known as Android Froyo) and newer, and "the update should reach all users worldwide in the coming weeks," the company said in a post on the Android Developer's website.

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Image: A screen shot of a video from Google showing off the redesigned Android Market. Credit: Google via YouTube

Facebook has some explaining to do in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, according to a report.

Data protection agencies in those countries want the Palo Alto company to detail what it does with the information it collects from its more than 750 million users, according to news agency Agence France-Presse.

"This is a common action to obtain better knowledge of how personal information is handled by the world's largest social network," Hans-Olof Lindblom, the Swedish Data Inspection Board's chief attorney, told AFP.

A list of 45 questions regarding data collection and privacy has been sent to Facebook by Norway's data protection agency on behalf of respective authorities in the four Nordic countries, AFP said.

The questions cover what Facebook does with photos uploaded to its network, "the consequences of clicking the 'like' button to comment on posted items, and the sharing of data that can help determine a user's name and address with third parties," the AFP report said.

The four nations also want to know what Facebook does with data from a user identifying religious beliefs and sexual preferences or when he or she writes on a friend's "Facebook wall," the report said.

Facebook is being asked to respond to the 45 questions by the end of August and "accurately as possible, but in no more than 3-4 sentences," the AFP said.

"We have for a long time had a good dialogue with Facebook's headquarters," Bjoern Erik Thon of the Norwegian agency told AFP. "Despite the fact that Facebook is continuously working on improving information to its members, it is unclear what information Facebook collects and how this is used and passed on."

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Photo: Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, attends the Allen & Co. media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in July. Credit: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg

Foursquare is looking to become more than just an app for a quick "check-in" at a favorite restaurant or for browsing to see where friends have been lately, and it's doing that by becoming a portal for daily-deals services LivingSocial and YP.com's Deal of the Day.

The New York start-up -- which recently raised $50 million, passed 10 million registered users and inked a deal with American Express -- is expanding its "specials" feature to include "deals."

Foursquare specials allow businesses to give discounts or free items that are usually tied to a user's activity in the app. For example, the "mayor" of a location -- the person who checks in the most --  might get a free drink at a pizza parlor.

The addition of deals will enable users to get "deep discounts that you buy ahead of time," Foursquare said in a blog post announcing its partnerships in the new feature.

LivingSocial, a daily-deals website that may be preparing to file a $1-billion IPO soon, will offer group-buying discounts through Foursquare, as will BuyWithMe and the AT&T-owned YP.com Deal of the Day service, "with 50% off their daily deals" in Atlanta, Los Angeles and the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, Foursquare said.

Gilt City will offer "exclusive menus and tickets to sold-out shows," and Zozi will offer "unique experiences and activities like moonlight kayaking, cycling and wine tasting, and shark diving," Foursquare said. Users will start seeing the deals show up this week.

What deals a Foursquare user is offered in-app will depend on where a user checks in and what friends on the service are doing too.

If users find a discounted item they want to buy, they'll be able to do so from within the Foursquare app or while surfing Foursquare.com using a credit card.

For now, the deals are available only in Foursquare's BlackBerry, Android and iOS apps in the U.S., Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But more deals and countries will be added soon, Foursquare said.

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Image: Simulated screen shots of deals offered within the Foursquare app. Credit: Foursquare

Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor declared 2011 the year of mobile for Facebook.

On Tuesday, the company rolled out "Facebook for Every Phone," a free app that makes it easy to access the social networking service from more than 2,500 different phones. It's offering unlimited data on the app for the first 90 days of use to get people to try it. And it's working on making the app available on even more handsets.

The new Facebook app has news feed, an inbox and a photo-sharing feature. You can download it at m.facebook.com.

Mobile is a crucial frontier for Facebook as social networking becomes increasingly mobile. Facebook wants to hook up with all of its 750 million users on their mobile phones, which Taylor describes as "inherently social." Mobile users are twice as active on Facebook as people who are logging on via personal computers. So far, more than 250 million Facebook users are connecting via mobile.

Taylor predicts mobile use will eventually eclipse desktop use.

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Images: Facebook's new "Facebook for every phone" app. Credit: Facebook

Phones with dedicated Facebook buttons are on the way and AT&T is now taking pre-orders for the first model -- the aptly named HTC Status.

Back in February, the Status was unveiled as the ChaCha, alongside another Facebook-friendly phone, the Salsa, which also featured a small, blue Facebook button at the bottom of the device which, when pushed, leads users directly to the social networking service to post photos and links and other content automatically, depending on what is being done on the phone at the time.

AT&T began taking preorders for the Status on Monday, but the phone will also be sold through BestBuy stores.

The Status, which will sell for $49.99 with a two-year contract, is set to hit stores on Sunday and will feature a full keyboard, a five-megapixel camera on the rear and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front for, ideally, video chatting or photos.

The screen looks a bit small compared with many smartphones -- just 2.6-inches and 480 by 320 pixels in resolution -- but this phone is meant for Facebook power users, not so much Android app power users.

And it will be Android powering the phone's operations -- Android Honeycomb (the latest version of Google's phone operating system) with HTC's Sense user interface modified for the smaller touchscreen and Facebook-friendliness.

No word yet on when the Salsa will arrive, or whether or not HTC will let that one keep its original dance-inspired name.

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Image: A screenshot of AT&T's pre-order page for the HTC Status. Credit: AT&T

Philadelphia's two largest newspapers -- the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News -- are planning on launching a low-priced Android tablet for subscribers later this year.

Greg Osberg, chief executive of the Philadelphia Media Group, which is the company that oversees both papers and their joint website Philly.com, said in announcing the plan that the move to bundle tablets with content from a newspaper company will be the first of its kind, according to a report from Philly.com.

The tablets will be "deeply discounted" and run on Google's Android operating system -- which is the most popular mobile OS and something Google gives away for free. Each tablet will come with four applications already installed that will be for reading and viewing news content from the two newspapers and Philly.com.

Osberg met Philadelphia Media Group employees at a printing plant Monday and said the tablets would "break ground in the industry, which has been struggling to maintain revenues as consumers gradually shift their reading preferences from print publications to computers, smartphones and other digital devices," Philly.com reported

The chief executive also announced a "new media-technology incubator" that will be started at the company's headquarters that will be funded in part by a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, Philly.com reported. Both the tablets and the incubator are part of what the Philadelphia Media Group is calling the Project Liberty Initiative.

The tablet announcement comes about a year after the Philadelphia Media Group emerged from bankruptcy, PCMag.com noted.

The main idea here is that fewer people are reading the physical paper, more people are reading online and tablets are a device that more and more people using to read, surf the Web and engage with apps, games and news.

By selling the tablet itself at a lower price and offering discounted digital subscriptions, the Philadelphia Media Group is looking to both tap into the growing tablet market and the success of Google's Android OS, as well as cultivate a new generation of readers -- people who otherwise likely wouldn't subscribe to a daily paper.

Osberg, in a video posted to YouTube by the blog Liliputing, says about the project that getting readers back to a paid model from a free-app and free-website model is key in making the tablet venture work.

"First of all we wanted to preserve paid content," Osberg said in the video. "There are a lot of media companies that are offering up apps now -- whether Apple apps or Android apps, they're free. And that was a trap we didn't want to fall into because the print world fell into that trap when the Internet was created because we all gave our content away for free.

"So the main thing was we wanted to preserve paid content on any platform that we go forward with."

Osberg also said in the video that the company plans to launch a "beta test" of the tablets to a small number of consumers in August and see what readers like and don't like, before a larger launch of the tablet in November on Black Friday, the huge shopping day after Thanksgiving.

Pricing, length of subscriptions required, screen size and other physical details, and even who will make the tablet -- all those details were left out of Osberg's announcement Monday.

Check out the YouTube video of Osberg announcing the tablets below.

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Image: A screenshot from a video of Philadelphia Media Group Chief Executive Greg Osberg announcing the newspaper publisher's plans to launch an Android-based tablet later this year. Credit: BradLinder/Lilpunting/YouTube

It was only a matter of time before some institution of higher learning surveyed iPad owners about the burning question: Where are you usually when you're using the tablet computer? In a bus? Bedroom? Kitchen? Hiding from your boss in a cupboard?

Well, most owners (51%) spent more quality with their Apple iPads in the comfort of a couch or easy chair than in their office (only 6%), at work (7%), in the bedroom (17%) or in the kitchen (6%), according to a recent survey of 561 iPad owners conducted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. Alas, the survey neglected to include bathroom as a category.

Those surveyed also reported that they most frequently used the Safari Web browser app (21%), followed closely by apps for Mail (20%) and the New York Times (13%).

And apparently people like to read a lot on their iPads: more than half liked to catch up with news using apps that aggregate stories. Furthermore, 41% read newspapers with an app and 39% read books.

And among those who buy magazines via the iPad, a good portion will work through them in the early morning (between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m.) or at night (between 8 and 11 p.m.).

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Photo: Matt Steiger of Hermosa Beach orders his lunch using an iPad at Stacked restaurant in Torrance on May 31. Credit: Jae C. Hong / Associated Press

A group of hackers published online files that it says contains a list of roughly 90,000 military email addresses and passwords belonging to a prominent defense and homeland security consultant for the U.S. government, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.

AntiSec –- a band of hackers reportedly made up of members from groups named Anonymous and the disbanded LulzSec –- posted the information to the website PirateBay.org.

“We found maps and keys for various other treasure chests buried on the islands of government agencies, federal contractors and shady whitehat companies,” the post said. “This material surely will keep our blackhat friends busy for a while.”

In an article, the Associated Press shot down AntiSec's assertion that it had captured 90,000 military emails and “counted only about 67,000 unique email addresses, of which about 53,000 carried .mil domains. The rest appeared to be affiliated with educational institutions or defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin Corp. or SAIC.”

McLean, Va.-based Booz Allen, which consults organizations on cyber warfare, tweeted: “As part of @BoozAllen security policy, we generally do not comment on specific threats or actions taken against our systems.”

AntiSec dubbed the operation “MILITARY MELTDOWN MONDAY: MANGLING BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON.”

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Image credit: AntiSec via PirateBay.org

Google Books can be purchased from the Google eBookstore on all sorts of desktops, laptops and tablets -- iPads, Galaxy Tabs, G-Slates and Flyers -- but as of yet no e-readers.

Not on a Kobo. Or a Kindle. Or a Nook.

But that is set to change Sunday, when the iRiver Story HD e-reader hits Target stores across the U.S. and becomes the first e-reader to connect to the Google eBookstore.

As The Times' Carolyn Kellogg writes on our sister blog Jacket Copy, the device aims at Amazon's bestselling Kindle with a $139.99 price tag, Wi-Fi connectivity and a sizable black-and-white e-ink screen.

But the name, iRiver Story HD, doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. From Kellogg:

When applied to a television, "HD" generally means "High Definition," which refers to a digitally compressed high resolution color image. Since the iriver Story HD is a black-on-gray e-ink reader, I'm not sure what HD means. Maybe our colleagues at the Technology blog can explain what the "HD" stands for.

Or maybe it means "Hey Dude," "Happy Documents" or "Hot Diggity." Who knows? Specs for the new device aren't yet available on the iRiver website.

Well, as of now, the Technology blog is stumped as to why the letters H and D are stamped at the end of the iRiver Story's name. In a blog post, Google says the iRiver Story HD features a "high-resolution e-ink screen and a QWERTY keyboard for easy searching."

As Kellogg noted, "HD" in consumer electronics terms often identifies a gadget that can display images at a resolution of 720p or 1080p -- the number of horizontal lines of pixels rendered on a TV or tablet.

But e-ink screens don't use pixels in the same way a computer or phone screen does -- e-ink screens run by pushing microcapsules of ink between layers of film to display an image. Maybe iRiver is trying to tell us that its e-reader will have 1080 horizontal lines' worth of microcapsules in the Story HD's display?

Officials at iRiver were unavailable to comment on the name.

One thing we know for sure is that the Story HD lacks the snappy touch-screens of the new Barnes & Noble Nook and the Kobo eReader Touch Edition devices. No touch-capable Kindle has been released either.

But although touch-screen e-readers feel like a future that's already arrived, iRiver's Story HD is skirting that trend for now.

[Corrected 7:43 p.m.: An earlier version of the post incorrectly said that Google eBooks couldn't be read on Barnes and Noble's Nook or the Kobo eReader Touch Edition. Google eBooks, which come in the ePub format, can be read on those devices, just not purchased on the device itself.]

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Images: The iRiver Story HD e-reader. Credit: Google