Admit it, no matter how old you are, you can still remember what the bell sounded like at your school.

You can still remember pushing your way through the hallways to your next class, the sound of the chalk squeaking against the chalkboard or the minute hand ticking on the clock in your math class that you swore ran slower than every other clock in the building.

But that was then. Khan Academy is now.

Online learning on steroids, Khan Academy is a one-world schoolhouse that teaches thousands of free lessons on everything from algebra to medieval history to the fiscal cliff through YouTube. It is skyrocketing in popularity, sparking controversy and fundamentally challenging the very notion of education in the 21st century.

"What we're tackling right now is the learning side," said founder Sal Khan. "How can we democratize the knowledge so that anyone can get to the level they want to."

Khan founded the non-profit Khan Academy kind of by accident. Now 7 million students from around the world are "attending" the Khan Academy online every month and he said that number is growing by 400 percent per year.

His lessons have been viewed more than 200 million times, with more than half a billion exercises completed through the company's software, all in six years.

"I'm not an education radical," Khan said. "What I'm doing and we're doing is bringing back very old ideas that have been proven but somehow got lost in the haze."

Khan is an unlikely education reformer. He is a former hedge fund analyst -- MIT undergrad, Harvard MBA -- who just stumbled upon his revolution when he tried to help a young cousin with her algebra homework back in 2004.

"I started tutoring her remotely," he said. "I was in Boston, she was in New Orleans, and after that I started tutoring other family members and eventually started putting stuff on YouTube."

In a few weeks, Khan said he noticed that the lessons he was making for his relatives was going viral, racking up thousands of views, and he started receiving more and more requests from strangers for help.

Visually, Khan's YouTube videos are not the kind of videos you would expect to go viral. They are more of a virtual blackboard. But they work and education reformers all over the world have noticed, including some heavy hitters like Bill Gates.

Gates did more than look at the Khan Academy videos, he helped bankroll the project.

"[Gates] is incredibly sharp and really cares about these problems," Khan said.

So in 2009, Khan finally quit his job and partnered with the Gates Foundation and Google to form the Khan Academy.

Here's how it works: Students watch the videos and then work on a problem set based on the lesson posted on the company's website. If they pass, they move on to the next lesson. If it looks like they don't understand the concept, the website takes them back through what they missed.

The goal is not to replace the traditional classroom. The goal is to liberate it.

"The idea of students being grouped in age-based cohorts, going in a set pace, the sort of school we all grew up in, taking notes, passive in the lecture hall, this was not the way students were educated for most of history," Khan said. "It's not the way humans naturally learn if we look at the research."

Instead, Khan and his allies see classrooms thrumming with creative activity, spurred by the fact that kids will have already engaged the subject matter through the online lessons.

His ideal classroom, Khan said, is not a bunch of chairs all positioned to look at a teacher standing in front of the class, but a "much more collaborative space."

"It's not one pace fits all anymore," he said. "The teacher will be doing focused interventions with them. They will be monitoring them, inspiring them. They won't be lecturing them."

About 25 to 30 schools, most of them based around Silicon Valley, have started implementing the Khan Academy as a pilot program, exploring how it might change teaching and learning.

Khan and his academy have plenty of critics. Some argue that his approach is likely to work only for students who are already motivated self-starters -- while leaving many other kids behind. And other critics contend that online learning dilutes an essential dimension of learning: The human connection between good teachers and students.

Khan said the best answer to his critics comes from the very kids who use his lessons and exercises.

"The single biggest thing that happened, not obvious to us at first, the teachers and the principal told us is that the students started to take ownership of their learning," he said. "They started not to say, 'Hey, I'm passive, tell me what to do next.' They started to say, 'These are my goals. I'm going to seek out information, teacher, you are my coach, you're my mentor, help me do it.'"

Times are changing, but one thing is constant: The preciousness of our children, the beauty of their young minds, the hopes we have for them.

They are already online. Maybe, at least in some ways, that is where their classrooms can be too.
 

Facebook may pay a €20,000 ($26,000) fine unless it allows German citizens to create anonymous accounts on the social network. A state data protection agency said that Facebook’s refusal to allow pseudonyms on the site is a violation of German law.

“It is unacceptable that a US portal like Facebook violates German data protection law, unopposed and with no prospect of an end,” data protection commissioner for the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Thilo Weicher, said in letters addressed to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Dublin-based Facebook Ireland Ltd.

German law states that all media services must offer users the ability to use a pseudonym wherever such an option is possible and reasonable.

An initial injunction was placed against Facebook in mid-December giving the company two weeks to change its policy.

Although the threat prompted Facebook to seek legal protection at an administrative court in Schleswig-Holstein, the site will likely not meet the agency's demand any time soon.

A Facebook spokesperson said the orders were without merit and a waste of German taxpayers’ money. He added that the company would fight the charges vigorously, the Guardian reported.

The company said in a statement that the pseudonym law is “not applicable to Facebook” and “infringes on higher ranking of European law.”

The site went on to say that it would still alter its privacy plan even if the law was applicable, because Facebook’s “real name culture” is part of its “mission of trust and security.”

The social network’s lack of cooperation came as no surprise to Jörg Hladjk, a lawyer specializing in data protection at Hunton & Williams in Brussels.

“I think it is not very likely Facebook will change its business model for one country, or even just one region in Germany…from a business perspective, this does not make a lot of sense,” he told the Guardian.
No stranger to controversy

Facebook has found itself embroiled in a number of privacy-related disputes in Germany in recent years.

In 2011, Schleswig-Holstein banned local organizations and companies from using Facebook’s 'like' button, claiming it allowed the site to monitor users.

The same year, Hamburg’s data protection agency ruled that Facebook’s facial recognition feature violated German privacy laws.

In 2012, a Berlin court ruled against Facebook for how it uses members’ email addresses to solicit new members.
 

Kazakhstan genetics have developed a technology for transforming adult stem cells into embryonic ones, Gaziza Danlybayeva, an expert in immunochemistry and immunobiotechnology with the National Biotechnology Center of Kazakhstan told Tengrinews.kz.

The Ubuntu operating system has been adapted to run on smartphones.

The Linux-based software will allow users to run desktop apps on their handsets, allowing them to double for PCs when docked to monitors.

Pakistan provisionally unblocked access to the popular video-sharing website YouTube on Saturday after taking measures to filter blasphemous material and pornography, officials said.
 
Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf in September ordered the blocking of YouTube after the US-based website refused to heed the government's call to remove a controversial anti-Islam video.
 
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Saturday notified all Internet companies to "immediately unblock/restore complete YouTube website provisionally till further orders".
 
Weeks of protests in Pakistan over the crudely made "Innocence of Muslims" film saw more than 20 people killed and caused serious damage in major cities.
 
Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Twitter that the decision to allow access was due to huge public demand, and that the telecom regulator would install a firewall to maintain a block on unseemly content.
 
"There was a great demand to unblock YouTube from all sections of society... expect the notification today," Malik said.
 
"PTA is finalising negotiations for acquiring a powerful firewall software to totally block pornographic and blasphemous material," he added.
 
The Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (ISPAK) confirmed they have also received the notification and welcomed the announcement.
 
ISPAK Convener Wahajus Siraj told AFP that when the ban first came into force, Internet video traffic in Pakistan plummeted by up to 30 percent.
 
"It is a good development because many people, especially students and institutions, were using YouTube for education, and were facing difficulties as alternate websites were not as good," he said.
 
According to PTA there are 2.1 million Internet subscribers in Pakistan.
 

A study of 2012's most read Wikipedia articles reveals striking differences in what proved popular across the different language versions of the online encyclopaedia.

Facebook topped the English edition while an entry for adult video actresses did best in Japan.

Hua Shan - a Chinese mountain featuring "the world's deadliest hiking trail" - topped the Dutch list.

By contrast, cul-de-sacs were the German site's most clicked entry.

The data was published by a Swedish software engineer Johan Gunnarsson as part of the Wikitrends project. His home land's most viewed article was a page dedicated to Sweden itself.
Sex and vampires

Lower entries on the lists also proved revealing.

While articles about Iran, its capital city Tehran and the country's New Year celebrations topped the Persian list, entries about sex, female circumcision and homosexuality also made its top 10.

An overview of Egypt topped the Arabic language version and was followed by a history of Muhammad Ali Pasha - the Ottoman army commander who became the country's ruler in 1805. He is viewed by many as the founder of the "modern" nation.

Sport featured prominently in the Indonesian edition with football, volleyball and basketball all coming within the top seven articles.

Italy appeared more obsessed with US television. Grey's Anatomy came out on top, and Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries followed shortly after.

The Russian version was led by an article about the country followed by one about YouTube. But entries for "porn site" and "unemployment" may provide greater insight into local users' lives.

Unusual results included the @ symbol making it into second place in the Spanish language edition, a type of Japanese holly topping the French list, and The European Regional Development Fund coming in third in Poland.

Canadian pop star Justin Bieber managed to make both the Danish and Norwegian top 10s, but was trumped by British boy band One Direction who appeared in the English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish and Danish lists.

Elsewhere, Facebook's photo sharing service Instagram - which did not make any of Wikipedia's top 10s - has published its own round-up of 2012.

The firm has focused on locations rather than themes.

Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport came out on top with more than 100,000 photos taken there, followed by the city's Siam Paragon shopping mall.

Thailand only recently held an auction to award 3G mobile network licences, and has instead focused on providing free wi-fi connectivity. It already has more than 200,000 hotspots and the government has announced a target of covering 80% of the country by May.

The Next Web tech blog suggests local habits had also aided Instagram's local popularity.

"Many mobile internet users in the region didn't spend much-time (or any time at all) using PCs, so their mobile or tablet is their single portal to the web and always-on web access is something new to them," wrote Jon Russell.

The US took the next seven of the top 10 spots thanks to snaps taken at California's Disneyland, New York's Times Square; San Francisco's AT&T Park; and Los Angeles' International Airport, Dodger stadium, Staples Center and Santa Monica Pier.

Paris's Eiffel Tower was the only European location to make the list.
 

It is the sort of thing adulterers dream of - technology which destroys all evidence of their philandering ways.

And it has now become a reality after Facebook announced a new app which erases pictures and messages within 10 seconds of being sent.

It is an advanced version of one of the the social networking site's original apps, the 'poke'.

The equivalent of a head nod or wink, the 'poke' in its old form is rarely used today as the site has become more advanced.

It has now been reinvented to be called 'Facebook Poke' and allows users to send fleeting messages, pokes, photos and 10-second videos to friends.

The messages expire after a set period of time, from 1 to 10 seconds, and cannot be retrieved by either party again, making it perfect for sending salacious images without leaving a trail.

'With the Poke app, you can poke or send a message, photo, or video to Facebook friends to share what you're up to in a lightweight way,' said the site in a blog post announcing the new app.

When you open the app, you can choose from a set of icons at the bottom of the screen to send a poke, type a 120-character message, open the camera to snap a picture - you cannot choose an existing photo - or shoot a 10-second video.

You then decide how long you want the recipient to see the message for.

It is said the new facility is similar to Snapchat, an app which is popular with younger age users, and which has gained a reputation as a tool for sending risque images.

Facebook is encouraging users to report inappropriate messages.

It's blog continued: 'If you ever see something you're uncomfortable with, you can click the gear menu and report it,' it said.
 

Researchers in the United States have developed a robotic arm controlled directly by thought with a level of agility closer than ever to a normal human limb.