Mike Swift

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Internet shouldn't just be a place to gather information and connect with friends, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes. It should also be the place where you preserve and share the most important memories of your life.

Zuckerberg on Thursday unveiled a new centerpiece of the social network called "Timeline," along with ways to allow friends to discover and share music, read and comment on the news, or watch the same TV show or movie their friends are enjoying.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Having designed and built a new energy-efficient data center in Oregon, Facebook is sharing the technology for the center and its customized servers with other Internet companies, hoping to cut the huge amounts of electricity consumed by the industry.

Facebook's new data center in Prineville, Ore., is 38 percent more energy-efficient than industry standards, resulting in a 24 percent savings in cost, the company said at a media event at its Palo Alto headquarters Thursday. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company executives and engineers said the social network is sharing the more efficient server technology and data center designs with anyone who is interested in using it, an effort Facebook is calling the Open Compute Project.

NASA's humanlike robot to fly in space

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SAN JOSE, Calif. -- To watch NASA's Robonaut 2 tip its head and gaze down at its open palms as it flexes its fingers and opposable thumbs is to believe there must be a human behind the opaque gold visor on the robot's face. In fact, there are only cameras.

Robonaut 2, which NASA hopes to launch Feb. 3 aboard the space shuttle Discovery on a flight to its permanent home on the International Space Station, will be the first humanoid-like robot to fly in space. Based on technology nurtured in part at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., and built jointly by the space agency and General Motors, the robot has a head, two arms and a humanlike chest and shoulders. It has fingers, thumbs and wrists with enough dexterity to grip a pen and write "hello." It can even dial an iPhone.

Robonaut 2 was built "to bring robots to the next level," said Vytas SunSpiral, a senior robotics researcher at Ames, "to where you could see them working in people's houses, or out in public."