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With sweeping panoramic views of the Cascade Mountains, Puget Sound, and the Space Needle, Facebook's quickly growing Seattle team is setting up shop in its new high-rise office.

During an open house of the satellite office today, company high-ups and local politicians showed off the new digs and emphasized Facebook's plans to continue expanding past its Silicon Valley home base, according to TechFlash.

Now the social network's Northwest offices are just a stone's throw from Microsoft's and Amazon's headquarters, and eBay, Zynga, and Google's regional offices.

A former Intel engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data from the chip giant before leaving the company, according to a Bloomberg report.

The worker, Biswamohan Pani, 36, of Chelmsford, Mass., stole the sensitive chip-related information "to advance his career with a competitor," according to Bloomberg. He worked at an Intel chip-manufacturing plant in Hudson, Mass.

Pani gave notice to Intel on May 29, 2008, with his last day set for June 11 and began work at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on June 2, "while retaining access to Intel's … Read more

Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 has powered fictional games like Gears of War 3 and Mass Effect 3, but now the technology is being used to assist real-world endeavors at government bodies like the FBI Academy through the just-launched Unreal Government Network.

Epic Games today announced a long-term Unreal 3 reseller agreement with Virtual Heroes, an interactive learning simulation company based in Raleigh, N.C.

As part of the deal, agencies and units of United States and allied governments will make use of Epic's game engine for a variety of purposes through the UGN.

Read more of "FBI using Unreal Engine 3 crime scene sim" at GameSpot. … Read more

Editors' note, March 22 at 1:14 p.m. PT: It seems the skeptics may have been right on this one. Gizmodo is now reporting that the purported birdman confessed on Dutch TV that this was indeed a hoax. Our original story follows, with some earlier updates.

If Red Bull doesn't actually give you wings, maybe this guy can.

Dutch mechanical engineer Jarno Smeets recently posted a video of what he says was his first successful flight with his homemade bird wings. Smeet's efforts take cloud computing to a (literally) whole new level, as the wings purportedly rely on an Android-powered HTC Wildfire S smartphone to process arm acceleration and compute the motor output.

The phone is connected to a microcontroller that is, in turn, connected to a Nintendo Wii Remote to measure acceleration and other flight parameters. … Read more

Google is planning to penalize sites that overuse search-engine-optimization techniques, according to a report.

Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land has posted an audio clip from a panel discussion at the recent South by Southwest confab, in which Google engineer Matt Cutts discusses the plans.

In search results, Google wants to "level the playing field" regarding "all those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO--versus those making great content and great sites," Schwartz quotes Cutts as saying, in a rough transcription.

"We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, … Read more

Google is about to embark on its biggest renovation in history. In order to keep up with increased competition and new technology, the Web giant is working to keep ahead of the pack by completely revamping its search function, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Google search executive Amit Singhal told The Wall Street Journal that the new Google search will look more like "how humans understand the world."

Changes are expected to roll out over the next few months, the Journal reports, but the full makeover to "next generation of search" will likely take years. … Read more

What if tobacco could grow fuel in its leaves?

As far-fetched as that sounds, a group of scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is testing the limits of genetic engineering to make the widely grown tobacco plant a carrier for hydrocarbons.

Scientists will be at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit this week to discuss the project, which received a $4.8 million grant over three years. The grant fits ARPA-E's mission of funding research that is high-risk but with a potential for a breakthrough.

Biofuels or biochemicals are typically made by growing plants and then converting that biomass into … Read more

Siri can be great in car, but you need to do some work to get it to play ball with all your other gear.

If you're a fan of America's long and storied history of great engineering, the National Park Service has got something for you.

On Monday, the park service's Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) Autodesk and kubit will announce the technological process of documenting these structures, a process that resulted in a broad collection of 3D imagery of projects like the Space Shuttle Discovery, as well as NASA launching pads, famous bridges, and more. The imagery was used to generate what are known as "point clouds" of data that, together, show a 3D version of the object. … Read more