Hundreds of same-sex couples wed across California

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Serenaded by a gay men’s chorus, showered with rose petals and toasted with champagne, hundreds of tearful same-sex couples got married across the state Tuesday in what some are calling California’s new Summer of Love.

Wearing everything from T-shirts to tuxedos and lavish gowns, they rushed down to county clerks’ offices to obtain marriage licenses and exchange vows on the first full day that gay marriage became legal in California by order of the state’s highest court. They were joined by jubilant crowds that came to witness the event.

George Takei, who played Sulu on the original “Star Trek,” beamed as he and his partner of 21 years, Brad Altman, obtained one of the new gender-neutral marriage licenses — with the words “Party A” and “Party B” instead of “bride” and “groom” — at the West Hollywood City Hall. They are planning a September wedding.

Yahoo Expands its Mobile Presence in Asia

Yahoo Mobile today extended its footprint in Asia by signing search and display advertising deals with multiple carriers.

Mobile operators Maxis Communications Behad in Malaysia, and Idea Cellular Limited in India each signed with Yahoo to sell and serve graphical ads on their mobile networks. Yahoo already has similar display advertising partnerships with carriers including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Vodafone U.K.

OneSearch, Yahoo’s search platform, will be distributed on the decks of five mobile operators including Mahanagar Telephon Nigam Limited (India), Hong Kong CSL Limited, Smart Communications (Philippines), Digital Mobile Phlis (Philippines), and Vibo (Taiwan). With the addition of these five carriers, Yahoo has more than 60 mobile search deals worldwide, all signed in the past 18 months.

“Yes, Yahoo will use international markets, as Google will as well, as a means of extending their mobile footprint,” said Nicholas Covey, director of insights at Nielsen Mobile. “Yahoo is fantastic about going out and aggressively creating relationships with carriers.”

One in Three Stars May Have "Super"-Earths

The most detailed survey yet of planets orbiting nearby stars indicates that a full 30 percent of them may harbor jumbo versions of our own planet. Astronomers who presented the finding this week at an international conference also announced they had discovered a star system bearing three such super-Earths—potentially rocky planets up to 10 times as massive as our own.

Both results come from the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) instrument at the European Southern Observatory on La Silla mountain in Chile, which looks for tiny changes in the color of starlight that indicate the star is wobbling under the sway of an orbiting planet. The frequency and strength of the wobbles tells researchers the approximate mass of the planet, its distance from the star and the time it takes to complete an orbit.

Past experiments indicated that about 7 percent of stars possess planets. But those studies had a hard time resolving relatively small color shifts corresponding to subtle changes in a star’s motion. Thus, the extrasolar planets discovered that way were typically at least as massive as the gas giants Saturn or Jupiter.

Spore Creature Creator for Mac OS X

The premise of Microcosmic God Spore is both simple and complex: life from start to finish. Will Wright of Sims fame has created a game so sweeping that you really have to wonder if it can be pulled off. Broken into five distinct phases of game play: tide pool, creature, tribal, civilization, space, you play god—though it’s more the watchmaker than the Zeus-type throwing lightning bolts and taking the shape of animals to have sex.

Spore has also been in the news for the Mac this year. A mobile component of the game was previewed for the iPhone as part of the Apple Event in March. Before that, at Macworld Expo 2008 the Creature Creator was up and running, and now it’s available as a demo to download. That’s the good news. The bad news is the system requirements will be keeping more than a few Mac users from playing iGod.