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Stonehenge has long been one of the world's most mysterious monuments. The massive rock circle has given up a few of its secrets to a digital scanning project led by historical-preservation organization English Heritage with an assist from the York Archaeological Trust. The 3D laser-scanning data collected last year has unveiled 72 hidden ax-head carvings in the surface of the stone.

Stonehenge was given a complete 3D-scanning treatment, generating 850 gigabytes of data. Archeologists put software from Bentley Systems to work to analyze the data. The resulting data crunching showed 72 carvings depicting Bronze Age tools that had been hiding from the naked eye for thousands of years. Almost all show ax heads, but one is likely a dagger.… Read more

Samsung mobile chief J.K. Shin offered some less-than-stellar observations about Microsoft in an interview published last night.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Shin said his company sees "lackluster demand for Windows-based products in Europe." And elsewhere around the world, he said, Microsoft's software efforts in smartphones and tablets are not going so well either.

"Smartphones and tablets based on Microsoft's Windows operating system aren't selling very well," Shin told the Journal, ostensibly referring to both Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. "There is a preference in the market … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas -- The future of 3D printing, a technology that's rapidly maturing and enabling a wide variety of people and companies to rapidly design and create physical products, is very bright.

That was the conclusion of a panel of experts who spoke at SXSW yesterday: while there are certainly limitations to the technology, the opportunities that 3D printing offers everyone from garage entrepreneurs to large corporations will be be plentiful, and often economically advantageous.

Today, the technology is already considered one of the hottest around, but during the talk -- which was moderated by CNET's Rich Brown … Read more

National governments are increasingly purchasing surveillance devices manufactured by a small number of corporate suppliers and using them to control dissidents, spy on journalists, and violate human rights, the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders warns in a new report released this afternoon.

The group's 2013 report for the first time names five private-sector companies "Corporate Enemies of the Internet" for their choice to become "digital mercenaries" and sell surveillance and censorship technology to authoritarian regimes.

"If these companies decided to sell to authoritarian regimes, they must have known that their products could be used … Read more

Research has shown that frequent use of a computer mouse may contribute to repetitive motion injuries. KeyCue for Mac claims to teach users how to replace the mouse with keyboard shortcuts, but its limited functionality and its price make it less useful than it could have been.

A 30-day free trial version of KeyCue for Mac is available, but it costs $29.99 for the full version. The program downloads quickly but despite having its own installer, proved difficult to set up. We had to try the installation several times due to the program claiming it could not install while … Read more

Everything on a Mac looks so polished on the outside that it may become unclear how to fine-tune settings under the hood of its graphical interface. Cocktail for Mac allows you to access an impressive number of useful tweaks and enhancements without entering a single line of code.

Cocktail for Mac can manually trigger maintenance scripts, optimize inactive RAM manually or periodically, toggle Spotlight indexing for chosen drives, force special startup modes, and access a lot of the hidden Finder and core app settings, to name just a few options. By "hidden," we mean those settings that are … Read more

Android's Gingerbread operating system has sticking power, but it's finally starting to loosen its hold.

New numbers from Google show that nearly half of all Android devices are running versions of 4.0 and above -- surpassing Gingerbread's individual installed base.

Ice Cream Sandwich, 4.0, and Jelly Bean, 4.1 and 4.2, combined run on 45.1 percent of Android devices, according to numbers from the two week period ending on March 4. This is a 2.5 percent increase over last month.

However, individually, Gingerbread 2.3 still holds the majority of the market. … Read more

Intel's new "Haswell" chip design is just around the corner. But we're already getting a peek at finished products, courtesy of a German PC vendor.

High-end laptops with Intel's upcoming fourth-generation Core series of chips appeared on DevilTech's site, according to Heise online.

Unannounced Intel silicon in those rigs includes quad-core Core i7s, such as the 4800MQ and 4900MQ.

And speaking of leaks, Haswell chips are actually up for pre-order on some online retailers.

For those who follow Intel chip rollouts closely, the chipmaker usually debuts quad-core mobile chips first and then follows up … Read more

I never had any doubt that readers of this blog have the coolest systems, but the magnitude of the flood of homemade speakers, desktop systems, headphones, and all sorts of groovy turntables totally knocked me out. There's some sweet gear here, so click to the slideshow and check out the systems. Thanks to all who sent JPEGs -- I heard from well over 100 readers, so I can't show everyone's gear.