When you type with predictive text on your mobile phone the word ‘cool’ the word ‘book’ first appears. Users should then flick through the list of possible words to get to ‘cool’.

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..Can MTV Stay Cool?..

But the MTV empire today is a staple of the media Establishment and faces a slew of new threats. After all, it’s the iPod era, a broadband world, and the online generation is defining for itself what is edgy and new. Ratings may be strong for many of the channels, but the original MTV isn’t the must-see it was. “We watch it because it’s there,” says Marie McGrory, a Manhattan 10th grader. Can McGrath keep her empire cool enough and nimble enough for Marie’s generation and beyond?

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cleaning up coal emissions with algae?

Overshadowed by a multibillion-dollar push into other “clean-coal” technologies, a handful of tiny companies are racing to create an even cleaner, greener process using the same slimy stuff that thrives in the world’s oceans.

Enter Dr. Berzin, a rocket scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. About three years ago, while working on an experiment for growing algae on the International Space Station, he came up with the idea for using it to clean up power-plant exhaust.

If he could find the right strain of algae, he figured he could turn the nation’s greenhouse-gas-belching power plants into clean-green generators with an attached algae farm next door.

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..The Ultimate Geek Car?..

Mercedes-Benz probably didn’t have the geek set in mind when it designed its new flagship 2007 S-Class sedan. But when the luxury car hits U.S. streets in February, it’ll be packing a bundle of electronics that would make David Hasselhoff green with envy.

An onboard radar system, automated acceleration and braking controls, and a night-vision display are among the features that Mercedes describes as the most advanced available in cars today.

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..Survey gauges teens’ view of tech future..

The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, which gauges Americans’ attitudes toward invention and innovation, found that a third of teens (33 percent) predict the demise of gasoline-powered cars by the year 2015. One in four teens (26 percent) expects compact discs to be obsolete within the next decade, and roughly another one in five (22 percent) predicts desktop computers will be a thing of the past.

Teens are also optimistic that new inventions and innovations will be able to solve important global issues, such as clean water (91 percent), world hunger (89 percent), disease eradication (88 percent), pollution reduction (84 percent) and energy conservation (82 percent).

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Rupert Murdoch is no n00b

“I think [the current portal] model is in danger of becoming out of date,” he said. “Young people today — who are the great users of the Internet — know exactly what sites they want to go to and they go there, they don’t have to work their way through Yahoo!’s homepage, or MSN.” Later he added, “It [MySpace] certainly won’t be a traditional portal.”

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