Facebook Home's immediate future buddy lists, an app dock and folders

Facebook Home and the First phone to ship with it on board were revealed just over a month ago, and in the time since, the Home team has been hard at work improving the platform. Today at Facebook HQ we got to check in with Cory Ondrejka, Director of Mobile Engineering and Adam Mosseri, Director of Product to see how Home has been doing since its debut, and to hear what's in store for Home moving forward.

Thus far, Home's been installed on almost a million phones, which has given Facebook some clear insight about the ways it needs to be improved. Most complaints thus far have centered on Home's failings as an app launcher -- when you install Home on any phone, it rearranges your apps because there's no folder support and no app dock. Well, Mosseri and Ondrejka feel your pain and assured us that those two features will be rolling out in the coming months, and they plan to continue to iterate to make Home a robust launcher. Facebook also has plans to roll out a new buddy list feature that'll show up as an overlay on top of Cover Feed with a simple swipe. This lets users start conversations directly from Cover Feed instead of having to open up the messenger app to start chatting. That's not all Facebook has in store, however, so join us after the break for more.

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Engadget Primed The rise and rise of Bitcoin

Ask anyone about why Bitcoin has suddenly risen to prominence and they may offer one of a number of theories. Perhaps it'll be the one about Cypriots smuggling money out of their country, or the promise of a digital gold rush, or perhaps the tale of a disruptive new economy created by a person who may not even exist. Either way, if you'd like to untangle the myths, half-truths and labored economic newspeak behind the world that is Bitcoin, why not join us after the break?

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Engineering the future inside the third annual White House Science Fair

The White House West Wing, as ever, is very busy. It's nearly time for White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's daily press briefing, which today (April 22nd) will reveal that the Boston bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, won't be tried as an "enemy combatant." Just upstairs, the atmosphere is thankfully less intense. In the East Room and surrounding chambers, over 100 students -- STEM-based competition winners from 40 different states -- are making their best efforts to remain chipper while explaining projects they've no doubt discussed dozens (if not hundreds) of times before.

Later this afternoon, President Barack Obama will address the dozens of attendees -- accomplished students and educators, as well as folks like Bill Nye ("The Science Guy"), Levar Burton (of Reading Rainbow fame) and Kathryn D. Sullivan (the first American woman to walk in space). He'll characterize the students' projects as "really cool," and he'll call out some lucky winners by name while speaking to the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education in the United States.

Today is the culmination of years of work for many attendees, and it's an important day for the current administration as well. The White House Science Fair is an annual highlight of its "Educate to Innovate" initiative -- the Obama administration-led program that directs both public and private funds to a variety of programs, all aimed at bolstering STEM education in the US. It's a long-term, ambitious plan, and one that the White House is re-dedicating itself to in its proposed fiscal year 2014 budget: a planned reorganization coupled with $265 million, "redirected from within the Department [of Education] and from other agencies."

Beyond the occasional PR bump that events like the White House Science Fair bring, the Educate to Innovate initiative is largely one that won't reap dividends for some time. In 20 years, however, it may be the most important component of Obama's legacy.

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Samsung Galaxy S 4 Exynos 5 Octacore benchmarks tktk

Samsung's latest flagship, the Galaxy S 4, comes in two distinct flavors -- and they're both good. One uses the much-hyped Exynos Octa-core chip, while its identical twin takes advantage of the quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600. In either case, the availability depends on where you live: the Exynos-powered I9500 is difficult to find in North America (at least for now), but our friends at Negri Electronics, an online retailer currently stocking the Octa-core device, gave us the opportunity to play with a unit for a few days. During our time with the device, we were able to get a solid feel for how this particular version of Samsung's flagship compares to the Snapdragon 600-powered model. So how does it hold up against its Qualcomm brother in terms of performance and battery life? Read on to find out.

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Welcome to IRL, an ongoing feature where we talk about the gadgets, apps and toys we're using in real life and take a second look at products that already got the formal review treatment.

IRL: Dell's U2713H monitor and the X-Arcade Dual Joystick

A fleet of fancy cameras deserves a high-end monitor to match, right? And do we really need to explain why an Engadget editor would impulsively buy an arcade-style controller?

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Welcome to The After Math, where we attempt to summarize this week's tech news through numbers, decimal places and percentages.

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This week's After Math appears to have taken on a comic book theme. Want to make your own Thor hammer? How about your very own Atomic Watch -- rather than those radio-wave-based excuses of a timepiece? We've also got the very real prospect of civilian flights to outer space and, er, Kobe Bryant advertising Lenovo smartphones. Stranger things have happened, right? Join us after the break.

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Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green.

DNP Inhabitat's Week in Green TKTKTK

The start of May saw an abundance of groundbreaking stories about flora and fauna -- first, there was the heartwarming story of Naki'o, the first dog to be fitted with four prosthetic limbs after losing his legs to frostbite. Then we were surprised and slightly disturbed to learn that scientists in Uruguay used genetic engineering to create glowing sheep with genes from the Aequorea victoria jellyfish. In other illuminating news, a team of bioengineers in San Francisco is using genes from fireflies to create plants that glow. And the Institute of Space Systems in Germany announced plans to use Heliospectra's new LED lighting systems to conduct research into growing vegetables in outer space.

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Wikimedia's small screen future

The office is silent when our small film crew arrives at Wikimedia's San Francisco headquarters. There's none of the newsroom buzz one might associate with the operators of one of the world's largest sites. Hell, the day I started at AOL, there was a bulldog skateboarding through the halls. There are a few subtle, telltale internet startup signs, like several bottles of liquor hastily packed in a filing box on the lower floor, sitting next to a small CD mixer. While it's Friday afternoon, the company's resident mixologist is out at the moment. The celebration will have to wait.

Just to the right of the party box is Song Yingxing, a conference room named for the Chinese encyclopedist, which has more recently adopted the "Mushroom Kingdom" name, owing to a slew of gaming consoles and peripherals housed inside. It won't stay that way for long, according to Matthew Roth, the foundation's global communications manager, who's kindly devoted much of his afternoon to chaperoning us around the two floors. "No one really plays the games," he says. The hammock, too, is empty for our visit. It would be easy enough to chalk up such good behavior to the presence of a visiting media outlet, but sometimes the simplest answer is the best: Friday afternoon or not, the folks seated at these desks are hard at work.

In the lower of two levels occupied by the foundation, developers have their heads down, rushing to get the soon-to-be-released in-house Wikipedia app out the door. The project has only been on the drawing board since January, and the foundation only hired its first dedicated iOS developer in the past month. The move is the next step in expanding the site's already massive reach to corners of the world that it hasn't quite penetrated, an attempt to help the organization approach its utopian vision of free information for all. On its face, it's a simple photo uploader -- but it's more than that, really. It's a chance to open up Wikipedia editing to an even larger global audience. It's as good a reason as any to be inside on a beautiful mid-April Friday afternoon in Northern California.

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Solar Impulse sets off on its journey across the US

Early this morning at Moffet Air Field in Mountain View, California, Solar Impulse finally took off on the first leg of its barnstorming tour across the US. Of course, this isn't the first time the sun-powered plane and its pilots, Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, have flown long distance, but it is the first time it's taken wing through American airspace. Why has it come across the pond? To raise pubilc and political awareness about the benefits of going green and increasing energy efficiency -- and perhaps pick up an additional sponsor or two for its second-gen aircraft (currently in development) meant to fly around the world in 2015. "With the technologies we have onboard, we can divide by two the energy consumption of our world, and produce half of the rest [energy we need] with renewable sources" according to Piccard.

This first portion of the journey will end in Phoenix, and it'll take around twenty hours to get there, as the plane's meager output limits its average speed to around 40MPH. Should any of you want to join along with Piccard and Borschberg as they fly across the country, you can hit the Solar Impulse Across America website to see a livestream from the cockpit, along with real-time altitude, air speed and battery status of the aircraft. And, you can watch a video of Solar Impulse taking off on its North American journey and hear Borschberg talk about learning to fly it after the break.

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The iTunes influence, part three Art in the age of digital disruption

"What happened is way worse for musicians. It has forced musicians to be marketers."
John McVey, producer, Coupe Studios

"I fear that in general the only musicians able to create a truly independent and successful career are those who had one before the industry changed, who had the fan base in place to enable them to continue independently of the record labels." That's Peter Owen, an independent composer and producer. He is one of many musicians who feel that the internet has made the business of creativity more challenging.

Parts one and two of this series surveyed how iTunes and MP3 catalyzed the digital music movement for labels and consumers. The effect of the internet on musicians is less recognized. In one way, musicians have benefited similarly to consumers. While consumers have gained amazing access to music, musicians have acquired unprecedented access to listeners.

So it's the promised land for musicians, right? Not exactly. For many creators whose careers span the before-and-after of digital music, there is a crushing sense that the grass isn't greener after all.

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