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How do you send a giant rocket into space from California without anyone knowing? You can’t, really, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve got to tell everyone what the thing is hauling. US intelligence services launched the Delta IV Heavy rocket into space from the Vandenberg military base yesterday afternoon. That much we know. What we don’t know, however, is precisely what the thing was carrying.

Of course, such secrecy didn’t stop the military from bragging about the whole thing. The government actually issued a press release for the event. “This launch marks a significant milestone in our nation’s space capability,” said Lt. Col. Brady Hauboldt in the release. “We’ve really restored a national capability for heavy lift on the Western Range… This extends our ability to cost-effectively deliver payloads of all sizes and compliments.”

The logical guess here is that the rocket is carrying a really big, really expensive satellite–an “imagery intelligence satellite,” with a price tag of around one billion dollars.

Weird terms trend all the time. On occasion, however, we get some true gems. Remember “Bear Gall Bladder Uses?” How about “Why Won’t My Parakeet Eat My Diarrhea?”

“Is Kevjumba a heterosexual bear wrestler?” certainly follows in that proud tradition. The odd phrase pretty much dominated Google search last night, carrying into this morning, leaving folks who follow such things generally scratching their collective search engine optimizing heads.

So, how does a phrase like “Is Kevjumba a heterosexual bear wrestler?” make it to the top of the Google heap? Simple. A popular YouTube video. Kevjumba is Kevin Wu–a former Amazing Race contestant. Upset that Google auto-suggests “Is Kevjumba Gay,” the reality show star suggest a more…manly search phrase. 

Wu has more than one million followers. The aforementioned video has 180,000 views and counting at the moment. The rest, they say, is viral. Video after the jump.

Google is going to get into the coupon business, damn it–whether that means buying the leader in the field (Groupon) or launching a direct competitor. The former didn’t work out so well–while the company reportedly came really close to securing a multi-billion Groupon buyout, but the coupon site ultimately opted to stay independent.

Now Google is apparently starting from scratch with its own Groupon-like site, Google Offers. Mashable managed to grab some info on the yet-to-be-launched Offers. Google confirmed the existence of the site (a welcome change from most companies’ “we don’t comment on speculation” comment), telling the blog,

Google is communicating with small businesses to enlist their support and participation in a test of a pre-paid offers/vouchers program. This initiative is part of an ongoing effort at Google to make new products, such as the recent Offer Ads beta, that connect businesses with customers in new ways. We do not have more details to share at this time, but will keep you posted.

And here’s the explanation from the Offers fact sheet,

Google Offers is a new product to help potential customers and clientele find great deals in their area through a daily e-mail.

Sounds pretty familiar, huh? The user gets an e-mail and has a limited amount of time to respond to it. Offers will utilize Google Checkout and will have the requisite social connections (Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, and Buzz–remember Buzz?).

Google in the process of recruiting businesses to join the upcoming service. In fact, Mashable seems to have gotten its hands on just such a document.

We are totally ready for a quantum computer. Browse the dusty Engadget archives and you’ll find many posts about the things, each charting another step along the way to our supposed quantum future. Here’s another step, one that we think is a pretty big one. An international team of scientists has managed to generate 10 billion quantum entangled bits, the basic building block of a quantum computer, and embed them all in silicon which is, of course, the basic building block of a boring computer. It sounds like there’s still some work to be done to enable the team to actually modify and read the states of those qubits, and probably a decade’s worth of thumb-twiddling before they let any of us try to run Crysis on it, but yet another step has been made.

[Image credit: Smite-Meister]

Scientists create 10 billion qubits in silicon, get us closer than ever to quantum computing originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 09:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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