Hasta La Gadget!

You’d think that the Obama family would be doing all right financially these days, without Michelle having to pick up a night job. The First Lady was on the phones yesterday, however, taking calls for NORAD as part of the missile defense system’s 55 year tradition of Christmas Eve Santa tracking.

Obama took calls for about 40 minutes yesterday at Peterson Air Force Base, while her presidential husband took their daughters to the Beach. Obama’s participation marks the first time a First Lady has pitched in for NORAD’s annual event. Her presence took most callers by surprise.

One ten-year-old caller took the opportunity to ask the First Lady about her husband. “He’s a pretty good guy,” she told the young caller. “I mean, it’s a tough job and sometimes you want to do everything you can to help him, but it’s pretty easy being married to him. He’s kind of funny – fun to hang out with.”

Merry Christmas, everyone. The lists have been assessed. Twice, in fact. The naughty have been weeded out from the nice, and now it’s time for jolly old Saint Nick to get down to what he does best (aside from the whole cookie and milk thing): delivering presents.

If you just can’t wait for tonight to get in on the Santa action, good news–NORAD is tracking the jolly old fat man, as it has for the last 50 years, ever since a Colorado-area Sears store accidentally printed the contact information for the missile defense organization under a listing for Mr. Claus.

Things are a lot different than they were in 1955, of course–thanks to social networking, it’s now possible to track Santa’s every move (just like it is with the rest of us non-holiday icons). NORAD is utilizing Twitter, Facebook, and Google Earth to track Santa’s deliveries tonight. You can find all of that info over on the official Santa Tracking page.

What’s most lacking in modern day science journals? If you said “adorableness,” you’re right–the vast majority of the time, at least. And then something like this springs up in Biology Letters, a well-regarded science journal published by the UK’s Royal Society.

“Blackawton Bees” is a study on the way bees see colors and patterns. The group behind the journal called it a “genuine advance” in the study of insect vision. The advance, it turns out, was penned by an elementary school class of eight to 10-year-olds.

The study includes hand written notes and hand-drawn charts. The introduction reads, “Scientists do experiments on monkeys, because they are similar to man, but bees could actually be close to man too.”

They didn’t do it alone, of course–the study was helped along by a University of London neuroscientist.

Science just got a whole lot more adorable.

A woman is suing Google after one of the company’s Street View cameras managed to snap a picture of her undergarments, which were hanging outside of her home in Fukuoka, Japan. According to the woman, the images caused a good deal of anxiety over the possibility that she “might be the target of a sex crime,” adding, “It caused me to lose my job and I had to change my residence.”

The woman claims that the images aggravated her obsessive compulsive disorder over fears that everything she did was being video taped. She is suing the search giant for 600,000 Yen–or around $7,000. Sounds like the company is getting off pretty easy on that front.

Of course this is only the latest in a long line of privacy concerns and lawsuits that have sprung up in the wake of Google’s Street View feature.