Oh! Oh God, I spent the last 8 hours on Facebook!!

When you text thousands of people seven times a day for a week, and ask them whether they have felt temptation recently, what do you get? A giant database of thousands of tiny vices and people’s own admissions—some true, some likely edited for the sake of vanity—of whether they caved.

According to researchers who recently performed just such a study, people’s biggest willpower failures related to checking things like Twitter or email. People were more able to control sexual urges or the desire to spend money than they were the desire to check social media (though we note that it may take two people contemporaneously caving for certain sexual urges to be considered indulged). Though the paper isn’t available online yet for us to check on this, the researchers told The Guardian that the number of times people were tempted by cigarettes, coffee, and alcohol was surprisingly low, and that the desire to check social media was much more frequently reported. The fact that media temptation came up so frequently, and was so often indulged, may be because unlike smoking, drinking, or spending gobs of money, checking Twitter or Facebook costs nothing and has no long-term downsides, like lung cancer, or insolvency.

Ah, that’s what scientists think. But we can tell you: Twitter is time cancer, devouring minutes and hours, indiscriminate in its hunger. Be wary of its cheerful glow and seeming innocence. If you spend your best years bathed in a flow of bite-sized information nuggets, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Though asking people to tell you whether they snuck a cigarette or checked Twitter isn’t a totally foolproof way to get an honest look at the temptation landscape, it sure generates an interesting salad of factoids. But we do wonder about the effects the study method had on the study results. The researchers collected this information through BlackBerrys they distributed to subjects. The devices could do nothing other than receive and send texts to the lab, but what if just having an extra gadget around makes you think more about checking your smartphone?

Image courtesy of Aleksandr Kurganov / shutterstock

IT consultant Sohaib Athar was just “taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops” in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad when he described, in 140 characters or less, a helicopter hovering overhead and a “huge window shaking bang”—accidentally live-tweeting the U.S. raid that ended a decade-long manhunt and killed Osama bin Laden.

It’s clear from Athar’s tweets (@ReallyVirtual) that he had no idea what was going down—as evidenced by his reference to the “abbottabad helicopter/UFO“—but the unusual presence of helicopters and  Taliban disclaimer suggested to him that whatever was happening, it “must be a complicated situation.” UFO, not so much; situation, definitely.

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It’s official: The robots are taking over the space station.

It will start with Robonaut 2, the humanoid maintenance bot that NASA is sending to the International Space Station next week. And now Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to send its own bot to the ISS. JAXA’s humanoid robot will not only talk and Twitter, but it will also act as a space nurse, monitoring the health of the astronauts.

The researchers behind the project say the bot would have a number of attributes that would make it a valuable crew member. For example, they say, it would never have to sleep–so it could keep watch when the flesh and blood astronauts are in dreamland.

And then there are its conversational skills, which would make it a lively companion for those lonley spacefarers. “We are thinking in terms of a very human-like robot that would have facial expressions and be able to converse with the astronauts,” JAXA’s Satoshi Sano told the AP.

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While many East Coast residents were snowed in or stranded far from home after this Boxing Day’s blizzard, one man was on a mission.

Reaching out through his Twitter account (where he has more than a million followers), Newark, New Jersey mayor Cory Booker rallied his troops of plows and shovelers to the places they were needed most. A few examples from TIME’s article on Booker’s heroic efforts:

“Just doug [sic] a car out on Springfield Ave and broke the cardinal rule: ‘Lift with your Knees!!’ I think I left part of my back back there,” he reported in one message. One person let Booker know, via Twitter, that the snowy streets were preventing his sister from buying diapers. About an hour later, Booker was at the sister’s door, diapers in hand.

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Sick of chasing down climate denialists himself, Nigel Leck put his programming skills to use for him. He created the Twitter bot @AI_AGW, who also goes by the name “Turing Test.”

Every five minutes the bot searches Twitter for tweets relating to climate change denialism, and automatically responds to the posters using a database of hundreds of rebuttals, which include links to information and videos. Christopher Mims at Technology Review talked to Leck about the project:

The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn’t at liberty to divulge.

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Ncell, a subsidiary of the Swedish telecom company TeliaSonera, has installed a 3G data network in a Nepalese town that should reach the summit of Mount Everest. This high up, high-tech improvement will allow summit-ers to communicate with friends, family, and organizers from the top of the world.

A phone base station was set up near the town of Gorakshep at 17,000 feet above sea level, and the signal should reach to the peak about 12,000 feet above that, telecom officials said–but it hasn’t been tested yet. The service should be fast enough to allow adventurers to make video calls and surf the Internet from their phones.

Lars Nyberg, CEO of TeliaSonera, told the Associated Foreign Press how excited they were to take the mountain into the wireless internet age:

“This is a great milestone for mobile communications as the 3G high speed internet will bring faster, more affordable telecommunication services from the world’s tallest mountain,” said Lars Nyberg.

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This 100-year-old tree wants to tell you about its day.

The tree, an English-speaking Belgian, shares pictures, videos, audio, and comments about it’s day to day life with the world via its website, twitter feed, and Facebook page. But don’t try to Facebook friend it right now—the tree is already over its friend limit.

The tree’s also outfitted with special sensors that detect the CO2, soot and ozone levels and also acts as a weather station, detecting local rainfall and temperature fluctuations. All of this information is transmitted to software which translates it into status updates like these examples on io9:

They analyze what the tree sees and senses, then translate that into updates like “Won’t be doing too much photosynthesis in this cloudy weather,” and “This ozone concentration makes it difficult to do my job.” It also advises people to ride their bikes on days with air pollution.

The information gathered by the tree’s sensors can also be used by researchers. Check out the making of the social-media tree video for more information on what went into the creation of this arboreal social media master.

Though the tree has to deal with the ups and downs of climate change, it is still pretty chipper as based on his social media slogan:

Hello! I’m a tree, and this is my feed. I’ll be online all day to keep you posted on how I feel.

Related content:
Bad Astronomy: Archiving NASA’s social media
Bad Astronomy: Social media diseases
Discover Magazine: Talking Plants

Image: The talking tree’s Facebook Page

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have been tweeting from space for six months now, making that Twitter phenomenon officially old and busted. So what’s the new hotness? Tweets from an ISS-bound robot astronaut.

Robonaut 2 is currently cooling its heels at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, awaiting its scheduled trip to the International Space Station on November 1st. Once on board the ISS, the two-armed humanoid bot will help out astronauts with their duties; it expects to be particularly useful on tasks that are “too dangerous or boring for astronauts.” But it will also find time to tweet.

Already, Robonaut 2 has addressed some pressing questions via Twitter with answers like these:

“Robots are non-gender by design. I’m an it.”

“No, no relation to Hal. Don’t know if I’d want to admit to having him on my family tree if I was. Def. don’t condone his actions”

Fans can get much more information from the first robot astronaut during its “twitterview” tomorrow. Send a question marked #4R2 and Robonaut will begin answering them at 10 am CST.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Astronauts in Space Finally Enter the Intertubes
80beats: A New Crew Member for the Space Station: The “Robonaut 2″
80beats: Robonaut 2: Coming Soon to Space Stations and Assembly Lines Near You
80beats: Japanese Consortium: We’ll Send a Humanoid Robot to Walk on the Moon

Image: flickr / NASARobonaut

Many cat owners worry/wonder about what their buddies are up to while the humans are away at work. Are they eating the houseplants? Sleeping on the kitchen counter? Prowling next door to bother the neighbors’ pet bird?

Now, researchers in Japan hope to bridge the gap between humans and their pets by rigging cats with sensing devices that help owners track their felines’ activities.

Cat@Log, one such sensing device, allows you to snoop on your cat as he goes about his daily schedule.

You can track his movements, map his territory, and even see what he sees thanks to a bulky device that can be strapped on your kitty’s collar. The tech site Recombu says that Cat@Log comes loaded with a camera, microphone, microSD card, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and GPS.
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Since Twitter blew up into the mainstream last year, it’s become rife with teenybopper types who join the microblogging service just to follow their favorite airheaded celebrities. Which raises the question: Which airheaded celebrity has the, uh, most unsophisticated teenybopper followers?

Comedian and geek  Tom Scott got his creative juices cranking to create Stupid Fight–a website that lets you compare whose Twitter followers are dumber. This is great, in case you’ve ever wondered what sort of a person would follow actor Ashton Kutcher or all-around diva Kim Kardashian and try to send them messages.

Scott proclaims on his website:

FACT: A lot of people on Twitter are stupid. Many of these people follow celebrities and try to send them messages. But which celebrity’s fans are most stupid? It’s time to find out.

The idea itself is pretty simple. Scott explains:

Stupid Fight can’t go out and administer an intelligence test to each person that’s sending messages to a celebrity. So instead, it estimates based on several stupid indicators. Are they using twenty exclamation marks in a row? Do they endlessly use the abbreviation ‘OMG’? Do they seem incapable of working out where their Shift key is? These indicators have a strong correlation with the message, and its sender, being stupid.

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