On Thursday, Google went live with its expanded Street View for the UK.  The street level service now covers approximately 96% of the 246,985 miles of thoroughfares.

This major update comes on the back of a ruling from the EU that Google can only keep unblurred images for a maximum of 6 months.  Google’s policy before this ruling was to keep images for 12 months.

The service offers unprecedented views from the street level that can make finding your location much easier.  Or, as one of our forum members pointed out, “now I get to see my angry mother-in-law waving her handbag at the Google car as it was driving down her private drive”.

While not everyone loves the service because it invades on their privacy, the overall consensus is that this is a great tool when used appropriately.  And now that the service has expanded its area of coverage, more UK citizens should be able to accurately find their destinations.

According to AppleInsider, the next version of the iPhone OS, 4.0, will support multitasking, allowing users to switch back and forth between third party applications.  The inside source said they have provided a “full-on solution” to multitasking.  The much anticipated feature will put the iPhone and iPod touch in-line or even above other mobile phones in terms of features.

The issue of supporting multitasking on the iPhone has always been battery life and resources on the phone.  However, the iPhone always technically supports multitasking, if you count being able to make phone calls and use an application such as mail, text messaging or any other third party application at the same time.  The iPhone always has the phone application running in the background, so users can receive phone calls at any time.

This isn’t true multitasking as users have always wanted, where consumers are looking for the Palm Pre, Android or even the Windows Mobile multitasking experience, being able to switch between any applications they want, having it run in the background.

Users that jailbreak their devices can even multitask by installing an application called “backgrounder”, which gives the user the ability to run multiple third party applications at the same time.  Further tweaks can support switching between these background apps just like the Palm Pre can.

The development for iPhone OS 4.0 still has a long way to go, but nevertheless, it will bring multitasking.  There wasn’t any mention if this will support earlier versions of the iPhone and iPod touch.

The ingredients for life as we know it have been found in the Orion Nebula.

By finely separating the spectrum of incoming light, astronomers are able to detect the chemical fingerprints of molecules like water and methanol. The spectrograph that their work produces can be seen in the image above. The peaks represent the presence of the molecule indicated.

The new data was collected by the Herschel Telescope, launched into space last year by the European Space Agency. Herschel’s HiFi instrument uses a new technique to do more-sensitive spectroscopy. It will enable scientists to better understand the chemistry of space.

The Orion Nebula is located about 1,300 light-years away. No very active star-forming region is closer to Earth. M42, as the nebula is also known, is 24 light-years across.

Wired

A 101-year-old woman in China has baffled doctors after growing a huge goat-like horn on her forehead.

Zhang Ruifang claims the growth first appeared only last year and has since expanded to be more than 6cm long. Now her family in Linlou, Henan province, are concerned about a second mark on the other side of her forehead.

“[At first] we didn’t pay too much attention to it,” said Mrs Zhang’s youngest son Zhang Guozheng. ”Now something is also growing on the right side of her forehead — it’s quite possible that it’s another horn.”

9 News

Today, Ars Technica makes known that Microsoft has finally begun rolling it out to users. The roll out will gradually make its way to 100 million US customers over the next few weeks. Microsoft is calling it the “most significant homepage redesign in over a decade.” The redesign features a new butterfly logo as well as 30 updates based on loads of customer feedback.

Among the new features are:

• TrendWatch - highlights of the day’s top Twitter trends
• Hyper-local Tweets – shows you tweets based on your location
• My Cities - lets you save up to three cities to keep up with
• MSN Local - enables the display of relevant local information
• Hotmail - see your inbox on the MSN homepage

As a whole, the new site boasts tighter social networking integration. Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live “What’s New” are all part of the new experience. Microsoft says that testers of the new site were very happy with the social network additions and they have received very positive feedback.

If you aren’t seeing the new design yet, you can still preview it here. The site explains the changes and shows off the new visual experience. There’s even a video of The Office’s Brian Baumgartner showing off the new site. As you’d expect, he’s awesome.

Valve has been playing various games with the Internet community over the last couple of weeks. The ending to their popular puzzle game Portal was changed, hinting at a sequel, and the company began sending out teasers based on famous Apple ads that have appeared over the years. A couple of days ago, Valve did indeed announce that Portal 2 would be coming later in the year, but there were still puzzles to be solved. The latest issue of GameInformer has revealed a ton of info about the successor to Portal, including the fact that it’ll be coming to the Mac.

The aforementioned teaser images, included below, gave strong hints that Valve’s game distribution platform, Steam, would be coming to the Mac. This tied in with several discoveries within the platform’s files, showing various Mac-themed images, leading a large amount of people to believe that it was all but certain that we’d see Steam for OS X soon. As one of the teaser images showed a turret from the game Portal, it seemed obvious that the puzzle game would be included – but what about a sequel? Valve had been issuing clues to a Portal sequel and that it would be coming to Mac along with the other usual platforms, so it seemed very much within the realm of possibility. GameInformer managed to grab the first information on Portal 2 directly from Valve, and within the copy of the issue was a list of the release platforms for the game, confirming the rumors: PC, Xbox 360, and Mac.

Indeed, if Steam really does become a native application, it would give Apple’s OS X operating system a fairly hefty boost in the gaming region; currently, those who wish to game on OS X create a Boot Camp partition and run Windows from there, though this may soon be coming to an end. Valve is a large company which develops many high-profile titles, so if this takes off, it might signal a change in the way people perceive the Mac when it comes to gaming.

Images thanks to Neowin

Apple added to the iPad hype on Sunday as it unveiled a new TV commercial during the Oscars awards.

The commercial demonstrates most of what we have already seen and know about the iPad. It finishes by signing the advert off with “April 3″, the date of the U.S. launch for the iPad.

The iPad will be available on April 3 for the WiFi only version and a month later for the WiFi and 3G version. Pricing of the devices will be:

• 16GB WiFi only $499, WiFi + 3G $629
• 32GB WiFi only $599, WiFi + 3G $729
• 64GB WiFi only $699, WiFi + 3G $829

The iPad also has the following specs:

• 0.5″ thin
• Weighs 1.5 pounds
• 9.7″ IPS display
• 1GHz Apple A4 processor
• 16, 32, or 64GB of flash storage
• 802.11n, WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1
• 10 hours battery life