Google Wave and Google Buzz may have had troubles attracting usage, but the new ability to place calls from Gmailappears to have caught on quickly.

“Over 1,000,000 calls placed from Gmail in just 24 hours!” Google tweeted Thursday, evidently pleased with the number.

For comparison, there are somewhat more than 300 million people in the United States. If the average person makes 10 calls per day–research in 2008 put the number at 208 calls per month–that means about one out of every 3,000 calls in the U.S. went through the service on its first day.

The service lets Gmail users make free calls to U.S. and Canada and inexpensive calls to phones in other countries. It uses Gmail as an interface and optionally can integrate with Google Voice to receive calls as well.

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A Dallas, Texas man said he was able to catch burglars on camera from 1,400 miles away with the help of a $4.99 iPhone application.

Vincent Hunter said he was in Connecticut Friday afternoon when the iPhone app, iCam, alerted him to movement on the Web cams set up inside his home, WFAA-TV, Dallas, reported Tuesday.

“I’ve got a few webcams set up,” he said. “We could see it unfolding.”

Hunter said the application allowed him to view a live feed of two men shattering his patio door with a brick. He said he called 911 and watched as Dallas police entered the home seeking the two men, who fled the house.

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This fall, NASA researchers will move one step closer to sailing among the stars.

Astrophysicists and engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., have designed and built NanoSail-D, a “solar sail” that will test NASA’s ability to deploy a massive but fragile spacecraft from an extremely compact structure. Much like the wind pushing a sailboat through water, solar sails rely on sunlight to propel vehicles through space. The sail captures constantly streaming solar particles, called photons, with giant sails built from a lightweight material. Over time, the buildup of these particles provides enough thrust for a small spacecraft to travel in space.

Many scientists believe that solar sails have enormous potential. Because they take advantage of sunlight, they don’t require the chemical fuel that spacecraft currently rely on for propulsion. Less fuel translates into lower launch weight, lower costs and fewer logistical challenges. Solar sails accelerate slowly but surely, capable of eventually reaching tremendous speeds. In fact, most scientists consider solar sailing the only reasonable way to make interstellar travel a reality.
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The best Mars map ever made is now available online for planetary scientists and armchair astronauts alike.  And citizen scientists are invited to help make it even better.

Websites developed recently at Arizona State University’s Mars Space Flight Facility, in collaboration with NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Microsoft, make it easy for anyone to trek the craters, volcanoes, and dusty plains of Earth’s small red neighbor world.

“We’ve assembled the best global map of Mars to date,” says Philip Christensen, Regents’ Professor of geological sciences in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “And we made it available via the Internet so everyone can help make it better.”

The map is accessible as an interactive zoomable global map, which is the easiest for most viewers to use. (Advanced users with large bandwidth, powerful computers, and sophisticated software capable of handling gigabyte images, can download the map in sections at full resolution.)

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Verizon Wireless on Tuesday unveiled the Motorola Droid 2, the successor to one of the company’s most prominent and best-selling devices.

The Droid 2 will be available in stores Thursday and for pre-sale online Wednesday. Verizon will sell the new smartphone for $199 with a new two-year contract.

The biggest improvement the Droid 2 offers vs. its 10-month old predecessor is speed. The new phone’s 1 GHz processor is roughly twice as fast as the original Droid’s, and the Droid 2 has double the RAM.

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