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A Quick Tour of Google Chrome 9: Instant Search, 3D, and Apps

Google has launched version 9 of its , which features Chrome Instant search, a speed enhancer that loads Web pages as you type a URL. Other notable upgrades include WebGL support for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, as well as access to Google's new .

Chrome users don't have to do anything to upgrade to version 9, which downloads and installs automatically. You'll see this message when the upgrade is complete, and Chrome needs to restart:

For most users, Chrome Instant will be the most noticeable change. It's turned off by default, however. To activate it, go to the Basics tab of Chrome's options and check the box in the Search section:

With Instant enabled, most Web pages will load as soon as you type a URL in the search box (or "omnibox" in Google's parlance). In the example below, the PCWorld site appeared as soon as I typed "pc" in the omnibox.

WebGL support brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser--without the need for additional software. Google's , for instance, uses WebGL to employ a computer's GPU to speed up rendering of 3D graphics:

Lastly, Chrome users in the United States can now access the :

There's a link to the store on the New Tab page, plus two sample apps. If you ignore the sample apps, they'll eventually disappear.

Overall, Chrome 9 adds some compelling upgrades while retaining the speed and simplicity that makes Google's browser so compelling. Do check it out.

Contact Jeff Bertolucci via Twitter ) or at .

N.Z museum mulls options for mummified Maori heads

WELLINGTON (AFP) – For decades, New Zealand has campaigned for museums to repatriate the mummified and heavily-tattooed heads of Maori warriors held in collections worldwide -- now it must decide what to do with the gruesome but culturally valuable relics.

New Zealand's national museum Te Papa has more than 100 of the heads, known as toi moko, in storage in Wellington, along with about 500 skeletal remains plundered from Maori graves as recently as the 1930s.

In Maori culture, the dark swirls and geometric designs of traditional facial tattoos on men recognised high birth and rank, as well as achievements on the battlefield.

Te Herekiekie Herewini, who leads Te Papa's repatriation programme, said the heads of deceased chiefs or family members would be mummified as a way of preserving their spirit, while enemies' heads were preserved as war trophies.

"Initially the mummification of heads and bodies was part of our normal mourning process," he said.

"But when Europeans came, they saw the exotic nature of the heads and they became a coveted trading item because they were of commercial value in Europe, America and Australia."

The heads became so valuable that in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, some Maori hunted members of rival iwis (tribes) and murdered them to supply the burgeoning market in European museums for exotic human remains.

"For some of the iwi, trading in toi moko was strategic in accessing items such as muskets and European tools," Herewini said.

The trade in human heads was banned in the 1830s but over the next century museums turned their attention to skeletal remains.

New Zealand medical students also fed the demand, as they were required to take their own skeletons when they attended overseas colleges, with most of the bones robbed from Maori tombs.

"People would go to known caves or hidden burial sites where they knew Maori remains were and, without permission, they would take them and trade them," Herewini said. "Every museum wanted their own Maori head or Maori skeleton."

The grisly curios continued to be displayed in museums around the world, including New Zealand, until the 1970s.

Herewini said it was around then that Maori began pushing for the repatriation of their ancestors' remains, often meeting fierce resistance from institutions which feared it would set a precedent that could eventually see them forced to return human remains such as ancient Egyptian mummies.

The French parliament last year voted overwhelmingly in favour of returning around 15 Maori toi moko after years of debate about the implications of the move.

"These are much more than simple museum pieces," French lawmaker Michele Tabarot said at the time.

"These are human remains and some of these people were deliberately murdered to satisfy a despicable trade."

Herewini said repatriating remains was an emotional issue for Maori, who had a strong connection to the land and wanted to give the warriors the dignity of a proper funeral.

"For us, it's taking an ancestor back home, so it's the whole process of remembering," he said. "They're family members and it's important for them to be returned home to their resting place.

"The iwi don't know exactly who these people are but they do know they're connected to the land. They think about the different battles they were in, the different lifestyle they lived and the possible connections they have with them directly."

While the remains are returned to their iwi whenever possible, Herewini said that a lack of historical records meant about a quarter of the heads and bones held at Te Papa could not be identified.

They are stored in acid-free boxes in a special area of the museum and never go on display. Even viewing images of toi moko is considered taboo in Maori culture, Herewini said.

Building a permanent mausoleum for the unidentified remains in Wellington is under consideration but the Ngati Kuri tribe, in the country's far north, has put forward an alternative proposal.

They want to bury them near Te Rerenga Wairua, or Cape Reinga, the northernmost point in New Zealand, where Maori believe the spirits of the dead depart for the afterlife.

"It's a special area where there are ancient burial sites," Ngati Kuri Trust chairman Graeme Neho said. "Provided the other iwi agree, we believe placing their final resting place there would be a comfort to them and we would be their guardians."

Regardless of the remains' final destination, Herewiri sad he would continue his quest to return Maori ancestors to their homeland.

"For me, it's about righting a wrong, whether that was committed by Maori or Europeans is really immaterial," he said.

"It's completing the circle and bringing these people back home."

Mason's 17th shutout lifts Columbus over Wings 2-0

DETROIT – Steve Mason made 34 saves for his 17th career shutout to lead the Columbus Blue Jackets to a 3-0 win over the Detroit Red Wings on Friday night.

It was Mason's second shutout of the season and third against Detroit.

Antoine Vermette and Andrew Murray each had a goal and an assist and Jared Boll also scored for Columbus. Murray scored into an empty net with 1:12 remaining.

Jimmy Howard stopped 21 shots for the Red Wings.

Vermette's 12th goal opened the scoring with 7:51 left in the first period. He beat Howard with a one-time slap shot from the high slot as Vermette came off the bench.

Rick Nash's apparent goal with 6:39 left in the first was waved off because of a goaltender interference penalty to Derick Brassard.

Boll made it 2-0 with 7:49 left in the second period when he put in a one-timer from the low slot for his sixth goal. Murray set up Boll from behind the net.

Notes: Detroit C Pavel Datsyuk (broken bone in his right hand) and RW Tomas Holmstrom (broken right hand) remained out. It's possible that both may return Saturday night in Nashville. Datsyuk has missed 18 games and Holmstrom seven. ... Columbus D Rostislav Klesla missed his third game with a lower-body injury. ... Boll played junior hockey with the Ontario Hockey League's Plymouth Whalers, who are based in suburban Detroit.

UNC Asheville rolls past Presbyterian 88-55

ASHEVILLE, N.C. – J.P. Primm scored 15 points to reach 1,000 for his career as North Carolina-Asheville routed Presbyterian 88-55 on Thursday night.

Matt Dickey also had 15 points for the Bulldogs (12-10, 7-5 Big South Conference), who have won three of four games.

Four other players reached double figures and 10 players scored for UNC Asheville, which shot 67.7 percent from the field (21 of 31) in the first half and 61.1 percent (33 of 54) for the game.

The Bulldogs scored the game's first seven points and took a 23-4 lead on Jaron Lane's layup with 14:06 to play in the first half. Lane's 3-pointer gave UNC Asheville a 34-8 advantage with 8:47 to play.

Lane scored 14 points, John Williams had 11 and Chris Stephenson and D.J. Cunningham added 10 points each for the Bulldogs.

Jake Troyli scored 11 points and Ryan Hargrave added 10 for Presbyterian (10-14, 4-8).

Hunting for Earth-like Alien Planets: Q & A with Astronomer Geoff Marcy

Since astronomers discovered the first planet beyond our own solar system back in 1992, they've been on somewhat of a roll — the tally now tops 500.

And the finds are about to ramp up dramatically. Today (Feb. 1), NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission will make much of its data public. A press conference will follow tomorrow, during which researchers are expected to announce intriguing new information about many more possible alien planets.

Humanity thus appears poised to enter a productive new era in the study of alien worlds. One man leading the charge is Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Kepler co-investigator.

Marcy has had a hand in finding more alien planets than anyone else. He helped spot 70 of the first 100. He also found the first multi-planet system around a sun-like star, and he discovered the first planet that transits — or passes in front of — its star from our perspective on Earth.

SPACE.com caught up with Marcy last month in Seattle, at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, to chat about the accelerating pace of planet discovery, what we still don't know about alien worlds and whether there might be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

SPACE.com: What has led to the recent explosion in alien planet discoveries? Is it primarily better instrumentation, or better techniques?

Marcy: Well, let me give you a different vantage point. There is a bunch of astronomers who've been working really hard, and they're really innovative, pushing on the frontier technically, pushing on the frontier in terms of the science. And basically burning the midnight oil, essentially literally. I'm giving you the human component of all of this, because sometimes you don't get to see it.

What sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when a nice result shows up on all of the Web pages and the newspapers around the world — what you don't realize is to get that result meant that five or 10 people were burning that midnight oil, trimming the errors down to the point that the Earth-size planets are detectable.

It's easy to dismiss the discoveries as, "Oh, it's new computers, or it's new optics." These things happen because amazing people dream and then put their dreams into perspiration-dripping action.

SPACE.com: So if we were to have this conversation in 20 years, where do you think the total exoplanet count would stand?

Marcy: Honestly, Kepler's so good that it's hard to beat it. It gets the numbers. Kepler's going to find thousands. There's going to be another follow-up to Kepler, either from Europe or the U.S. or both. They'll find thousands.

I bet by 2020, there'll be 10,000 planets, and by 2030 there might be another 20,000 or 30,000 more planets. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

SPACE.com: Will this discovery arc we're on now continue to go up exponentially, or will it plateau?

Marcy:It'll plateau, because you can't do much better than Kepler. But let's be fair here. It's not the number of planets we care about; it's the quality. We want the Earth-size. We want planets in the habitable zone, and ultimately planets that are sending little radio signals to us for some reason or another.

SPACE.com: You've said that, with exoplanets, theory has really struck out. What are some of the things that we thought we knew, but it turns out were totally wrong about?

Marcy: Well, the first thing — I go back to 1996. No one wants to talk about this, because it's so embarrassing. The reason that as a community we struggled to find the first hot Jupiters isn't because we didn't have the technology. It's because the theorists led us astray. I'm speaking slightly jokingly, but not really.

There were theorists who said, "Look at our solar system. Of course the small, rocky planets are close in. The host star burned off the gases, so you're left with rocky planets. And look at the giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn — they had to form farther out, because it's colder, and the gases can gravitationally stick to the planets. Therefore, all planetary systems will have the following architecture: There will be an inner planet. The second planet out will be named Venus. The third planet out will have great lattes." I mean, it was just silly.

SPACE.com: And that's based on a sample size of one.

Marcy: It would be like trying to characterize human psychology by going to one distant Indonesian island and interviewing one person, and thinking that that gave you the full range of human psychology. And in 1996, there were papers where they said, Jupiter-sized planets, Saturn-sized planets, will all orbit far from their host star. Well, that of course tells you what to look for. If you write a proposal to try to find anything else, you're flying in the face of wisdom.

And we know now, of course, how near-sighted that was, how parochial that was.

SPACE.com: So do you think we are starting to get a handle on exoplanets now?

Marcy: I think so. We're always a little too confident, so I would hate to say, "Go home, we're all done." We do have these planets we're finding with Doppler work, and now with Kepler, that are five times the size of Earth, three times the size of Earth, 1.4 times the size of the Earth. And I don't think we really know how they formed.

Even the one we announced [the rocky, nearly Earth-size Kepler-10b], there are two main ways it might've formed. It might've formed like the Earth, or it might have formed like Uranus but it got so close to the host star that the gases and the water got evaporated away and left a bare, rocky core remnant.

SPACE.com: What are some of the biggest mysteries that are left?

Marcy: There's one huge one that nobody really wants to talk about. It's the age-old question: Are Earth-like planets common? We know they're out there for sure. I mean, there's too many stars. But there's two parts to the question. What do you mean by "Earth-like?" And then, how common are they?

Basically, we know what we want for Earth-like, so we shouldn't beat around the bush: We would love to know whether there are planets suitable for life as we know it.

And those Earth-like properties are a little bit mysterious, but we have some ideas. You want water in liquid form, you want stable temperatures over the course of millions, preferably billions, of years so that Darwinian evolution can get a good toehold.

You probably want a moon to stabilize the spin axis. You probably want a Jupiter to sweep up the debris. You probably want a stable ocean for a long enough time that it can serve as the solvent for biochemistry.

So that's probably what we mean by "Earth-like." But how common they are, we just don't know.

SPACE.com: Your research suggests that smaller planets may be pretty common — that nearly one in four nearby sun-like stars could host a roughly Earth-size planet.

Marcy: Yeah. But here's the sleeper idea that no one wants to talk about: Because Earth-size planets are so much smaller than the Jupiters, Saturns, Uranuses and Neptunes, and we now know that planets often get thrust into eccentric and misaligned orbits, the Earths are like the Volkswagens on a highway full of 18-wheelers.

The vulnerable planets are the small ones. And so to the extent that planetary systems undergo a billiards era — the Earth would be like putting a small marble on a pool table of 15 billiard balls. As you break, the little planets are going to be the ones slingshot right out of the solar system pool table.

SPACE.com: It's one thing to say they can form. But to say that they'll actually stick around long enough — that's a totally different question.

Marcy: Yeah. And I think they'll form. It's hard to imagine they wouldn't. If you make Jupiters, why wouldn't you make Earth-size planets? But the Earths — and maybe the Volkswagen is giving it too much credit. It's an 18-wheeler and a tricycle. Earth is a tricycle on Highway 5 running up and down the Pacific Coast.

And you don't even have to hit the tricycle. You just have to come close enough that gravity slingshots the poor tricycle right out of the system. So it's possible that Earth-like planets form, they get thrown out into the cold darkness of the galaxy and they have no chance of starting — never mind sustaining — life, because it's too cold out there.

And that's possible. We might be rare.

And by the way: Where are the SETI [search for extraterrestrial intelligence] signals? There is a non-detection that's like the elephant in the room. Forty years of Frank Drake and Carl Sagan looking for SETI signals, and we have precisely zero to show for it. So there's an indication — not definitive — that maybe the Earth is more precious than we had thought.

SPACE.com: Our solar system is so young, compared to the universe. And the universe is so big. So there's been lots of time and opportunity for advanced civilizations to get started, and to try to contact us. Some people think that the fact that we seemingly haven't been contacted means that we may well be alone in the universe.

Marcy: Well, you have to fold it in. The absence of an intelligent radio or television wave from any advanced civilization represents one indication, not a proof, that maybe habitable planets that sustain Darwinian evolution for a billion years —maybe they're rare. Maybe.

SPACE.com: What do you reckon? Do you have a gut feeling about this?

Marcy: I do. If I had to bet — and this is now beyond science — I would say that intelligent, technological critters are rare in the Milky Way galaxy. The evidence mounts. We Homo sapiens didn't arise until some quirk of environment on the East African savannah — so quirky that the hominid paleontologists still can't tell us why the australopithecines somehow evolved big brains and had dexterity that could play piano concertos, and things that make no real honest sense in terms of Darwinian evolution.

Why the high chaparral on the East African savannah would've led to a Tchaikovsky piano concerto, never mind the ability to build rocket ships — there's no evolutionary driver that the australopithecines suffered from that leads to rocket ships. And so that — and the fact that we had to wait four billion years without humans. Four billion years?

SPACE.com: Yes, it took four billion years to get there.

Marcy: Since the Cambrian explosion, we had hundreds of millions of years of multi-cellular, advanced life in which, guess what happened with brain size? Nothing.

You know the greatest species ever to roam the Earth? The dinosaurs — every kid knows this. And why? Well, because for 100 million years, the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. There were big ones, there were small ones. Every generation of baby dinosaurs had to outcompete all of the other dinosaurs. And you would think after 100 million years, each generation of baby dinosaur that was a little smarter would have out-survived the others and thereby slowly but surely increased dinosaur cranial size.

The reality from the paleontological record? Dinosaurs had the brains of chickens, and never got bigger. It shows that braininess is not a primary driver in evolution. We humans came across braininess because of something weird that happened on the East African savannah. And we can't imagine whether that's a common or rare thing.

SPACE.com: People assume evolution is directed, and it's always leading toward higher complexity and greater intelligence, but it's not.

Marcy: It's not. Dinosaurs show this in spades.

SPACE.com: You've said that we're about to enter a golden age of direct exoplanet imaging. Is that what the future holds — getting good, direct looks at alien planets to try to gauge their potential to support life?

Marcy: It is. There's two great things that we should be doing. One is that we should, as a species — and this means ESA [the European Space Agency], Japan, China, India, the United States, Canada — work together internationally to fund a space-borne telescope, probably interferometric, that can take pictures of Earth-size and Earth-like planets. We know how to do it.

Yes, it'll be expensive, but we do expensive things in science, and this is a great quest for humanity: Are there Earth-like and, indeed, habitable planets out there?

But the other thing to do — we should say it right away. We should have a full-fledged, Apollo-like SETI search. Why haven't we coherently gathered our resources and done SETI right?

SPACE.com: Finding alien intelligent life would be such a huge deal. It would change the way we think about ourselves and our place in the universe.

Marcy: Exactly. So why aren't we putting together our resources, nationally and internationally, and constructing a major radio telescope facility — and maybe, if there's money left over, an infrared facility — and sampling the universe for signals?

We know what to look for. That would be the rat-a-tat-tat of a radio signal. We don't know exactly what the code would be, but we'd be looking for pulses in the radio, in the infrared maybe, in the X-ray or UV. We'd have to think broadly. But this is a great quest for humanity.

It's the Armstrong, it's the Columbus of our time, essentially reaching out with radio waves and hunting for alien intelligent life. It would be a marvelous, inspirational effort. And right now we don't have enough going on, in my opinion.

Because it would mean — all 7 billion people on planet Earth would get up in the morning wondering, "Did they find the signal last night?"

SPACE.com: It makes you wonder why nations haven't joined together to do something like this. Economically, it would be a drop in the bucket.

Marcy: It's a drop in the bucket. Frankly, $1 billion would be good. It sounds like $1 billion is a lot of money. But not really. NASA's budget is $19 billion. Nineteen billion dollars every single year. So how about a billion of that for a SETI search? How about one year — 5 percent — to do SETI in a historic, Apollo-like way? I mean, Wow!

It puts Armstrong and the invention of fire sort of on a par. So it's worth one-nineteenth of one year's NASA budget. I think it's a great idea, and we know how to do it.

Yeah, it's a luxury. We need to feed the people on the planet Earth, we need to provide health care, we need to provide better education, we need to make sure that human beings are living. But we're doing that. And a billion is really a teeny fraction of many countries' annual budget.