Google Earth is fantastic, but this might be its most amazing feat yet: A scientist stumbled across an unknown green patch that turned out to be an unexplored forest home to brand new undiscovered species.

Julian Bayliss was looking around Google Earth for a new conservation project when he came across patches of green in Mozambique that appeared to be previously unexplored. Sure enough, those green patches were “7,000 hectares of forest, rich in biodiversity” that had been left untouched by scientists thanks to minor blips like miserable terrain and constant civil war.

An expedition launched in the fall to Mount Mabu discovered three new species of butterflies, a new Gaboon viper than can kill a human in a single bite, along with all kinds of other wildlife, like 200 types of butterflies and tropical plants, all in a matter of weeks.

The expedition leader, Jonathan Timberlake, says that this could just be the beginning—Google Earth might help scientists find other undiscovered pockets of biodiversity in areas like Mozambique and Papua New Guinea that haven’t been fully explored. I’ve got my fingers crossed for hobbits and Big Foot

The continuing transformation of YouTube’s “post-Hulu” era has now taken shape in a new widescreen format, increasing the layout to 960 pixels and 16:9 aspect ratio. After the news regarding YouTube’s move to carry feature-length films, the site-wide move is clearly designed not only to accommodate the incoming new official content, but to upgrade the capacity for higher quality user-generated content as well.

Videos which carry the traditional YouTube layout of 4:3 aspect ratio (which at this point is the majority of them,) will be contained in columns of black bars to preserve the integrity of the original ratio, similar to what one might see while watching a non-HD channel on an HDTV.

It’s no secret that Google has been paying close attention to the revenue figures between themselves and Hulu. They realize that Hulu, while having not as much traffic yet, is making serious money considering the short time it’s been in existence. The question (that has already been asked by many) remains: Exactly WHAT will the YouTube we all know and love transform into?

Want to know what you might die of? The company, called 23andMe, uses DNA to predict health risks and provide ancestry information to consumers.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is just one of many that, with a bit of saliva, can help you Google your DNA. But 23andMe has drawn more attention than most because co-founder Anne Wojcicki is married to Sergey Brin, who helped launch Google. The search giant is one of 23andMe’s investors.

Google invested $3.9 million in 23andMe, which Wojcicki, a former healthcare industry analyst, and Avey, a biopharmaceutical industry veteran, started in 2006. Brin and Wojcicki met after her sister rented her garage to him and Larry Page as office space for their then-budding search engine.

In the name, 23 refers to the number of pairs of chromosomes in the human body. The company hopes that by encouraging people to learn about their genetic information, it can help propel understanding of the human genome, bring the promise of personalized medicine and accelerate the discovery of new drugs.

With the launch of the new blog by a founding member of google whose wife works with 23and me, it was revealed that Sergey Brin has a greater than average risk of Parkinson’s disease.

In a way, this method is a farewell to guessing what ailments you might suffer if you have the opportunity to grow old.

We’re waiting for the next science breakthrough that exacts the how, the hour and the location.

Google has started an ambitious project to digitally archive millions of pages of old newspapers.

In 2006, Google started working with the New York Times and the Washington Post to index existing digital archives and make them searchable via Google’s search technology. The new effort expands that initiative, with the goal of reaching every story ever printed, “from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily,” according to a post on Google’s official blog.

“For more than 200 years, matters of local and national significance have been conveyed in newsprint–from revolutions and politics to fashion to local weather or high school football scores. Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it’s our goal to help readers find all of them,” wrote Punit Soni, a product manager at Google, on Google’s blog.

Google plans to archive the stories exactly as they appeared on the original paper, not just text versions. The stories would include original photographs, headlines and advertisements as well.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is partnering with ProQuest and Heritage, two online archiving companies, on the project.

“You’ll be able to explore this historical treasure trove by searching the Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News . Not every search will trigger this new content, but you can start by trying queries like [Nixon space shuttle] or [Titanic located],” Soni wrote on the blog. “Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we’ll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well.”

Recently, Google sent out a comic book unveiling the Google Chrome browser to bloggers and the media. Google now also officially announced Chrome on their blog and says that the beta version of Google Chrome will be available for download today.

Google’s reason to launch a new web browser is their believe that they can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.
Google is releasing a beta of Chrome for Windows today and is at work building versions for Mac and Linux.

The announcement of Google Chrome will increase yet again the amount of testing for web developers and web design agencies. Albeit Google Chrome is based on existing open source components it will behave for sure differently again for rendering and executing JavaScript.No word yet on any support for Newsgroups like Firefox add-ons and IE extensions allow.

A group of former Google engineers Monday unveiled a new search engine they hope will challenge the Internet giant’s supremacy. Cuil, (pronounced “cool”), takes a different tack than previous threats to Google.

Instead of concentrating on links to Web pages, Cuil focuses on a Web page’s actual content. The venture-financed search engine also presents the data in a different manner - a horizontal layout that includes images rather than Google’s low-key plain text displayed vertical.

Privacy is another area the four founding engineers hope will differentiate Cuil. The search engine won’t hold onto search histories, unlike Google.

Cuil also boasts it searches 120 billion Web pages. In 2005, when Google stopped publicly divulging the size of its search database, the Internet giant said it had a database of 8.2 billion Web locations. Friday, after public prodding, Google said it searches 1 trillion Web links.

Cuil, who’s name originates from Celtic folklore, is the child of three former Google engineers: Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier, along with Tom Costello, Patterson’s former-IBM search husband. In 2004, Google acquired Patterson’s last search engine.

Cuil’s inventors have a tough road to hoe to compete with Google. Searches for Usenet and Newsgroups are much different than Google results and seem to partial more to blog community sites rather than useful resources at the moment.