AfterTek

MySpace.com on Monday said it has licensed technology to block unauthorized copyrighted music audio recordings from being posted on its site.  Like YouTube and other social networking sites, MySpace is feeling the pressure from major record labels and Hollywood studios to stem the tide of copyright infringers. Social networkers often use songs or movie and television clips in mashups and post them on their sites.

“MySpace is staunchly committed to protecting artists’ rights, whether those artists are on major labels or are independent acts,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace. “This is another important step we’re taking to ensure artists control the content they create.”

Just as some species of bird-like dinosaurs were evolving into the feathered fellows we know today, a surprising fossil find shows that the honeybees, Apis mellifera, we know and love today were also evolving in the years before the Age of the Dinosaur ended 65 million years ago.

Insect fossils are semi-rarities for fossil scholars, for a simple reason. Bugs lack bones. Most insect fossils are actually remains trapped in amber, which is fossilized tree sap. A good example is the freshly-reported fossil bee found inside an amber mine in northern Myanmar. Reported in the current Science magazine, the amber chip-contained bee is 100 million years old and belongs to a previously unknown bee species, Melittosphex burmensis.

Your view of the Web is in for a change in some cases, whether you like it or not.  This can happen with either of two new browsers. One’s the second major update to Mozilla Firefox in a year. The other is more of a surprise to people.  It comes from the company that sat out the last half decade of browser innovation, Microsoft, and it will be automatically installed on Windows XP machines starting next week.