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Confirming one of the more open secrets of the tech industry this spring, Microsoft announced Tuesday that the launch date for Windows 7 is Oct. 22. That is several months earlier than the software giant forecast last year, when it projected a launch in the first quarter of 2010.

The likelihood of a 2009 release increased significantly this spring, when Microsoft sent out its official release candidate and hinted at a the possibility of a “holiday 2009 launch.” The actual release will be some weeks ahead of even that optimistic target.

News of the formal launch date broke Tuesday in Ina Fried’s Beyond Binary column on Cnet, following an interview she did with Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte.

According to Veghte, Fried said, “the feedback from the release candidate has been good.” In a separate interview with Fried, Phil McKinney, head of HP’s computer unit, went even farther: “We’re locked and loaded for the launch,” he said. “The quality of code is just absolutely stellar.”

Lucky 7?

One hint of a possible fall launch showed up in the inboxes of Windows 7 beta testers Monday. Stephen Rose Sr., community manager for the Microsoft Windows Client IT Pro Division, and the editor of Microsoft’s Springboard Insider Series newsletter, warned testers that the functionality of the beta software will end this summer.

“Please be aware,” Rose said, “that the Windows 7 beta expires on Aug. 1 and that, beginning July 1, your machine will reboot every two hours (nice reminder, huh?).”

Microsoft’s accelerated schedule for the release of Windows 7 is a clear sign of the company’s eagerness to give customers and tech reporters something else to talk about besides the frustrations of working with Windows Vista. The poor sales of the memory-glutton software, particularly in the business community, has allowed other operating systems, including Mac OS…

A special series of NASA satellite images documenting how our world—forests, oceans, human landscapes, has changed during the previous decade.

The Aral Sea Disappears

In a series of photos taken by NASA, you can observe the dramatic disappearance of the Aral Sea in a relatively short period – between 2000 and 2009.NASA has been able to capture the disappearance of the Aral Sea from space. In the 1960’s Russia diverted water from several major rivers to irrigation projects for growing cotton and other crops. The result has been the complete destruction of one what was once the fourth largest inland sea in the world.

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NASA’s ability to document this entirely unprecedented event is not only fascinating, but it’s a lesson to how quickly entire ecosystems (and the societies that rely on them) can collapse. The Aral sea was once surrounded by villages that relied on the Aral seas fisheries. Those towns are now all but deserted, and fishing boats sit on dry land.

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Urbanization of Dubai

To expand the possibilities for beachfront tourist development, Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates, undertook a massive engineering project to create hundreds of artificial islands along its Persian Gulf coastline. Built from sand dredged from the sea floor and protected from erosion by rock breakwaters, the islands were shaped into recognizable forms, including two large palm trees.

In these false-color images, bare ground appears brown, vegetation appears red, water appears dark blue, and buildings and paved surfaces appear light blue or gray.

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Amazon Deforestation

The state of Rondônia in western Brazil is one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon. In the past three decades, clearing and degradation of the state’s original 208,000 square kilometers of forest (about 51.4 million acres, an area slightly smaller than the state of Kansas) has been rapid: 4,200 square kilometers cleared by 1978; 30,000 by 1988; and 53,300 by 1998. By 2003, an estimated 67,764 square kilometers of rainforest—an area larger than the state of West Virginia—had been cleared.

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Twitter investors may be speculating about the value of social-networking sites, but no one is speculating about their popularity.

In the U.S. alone, the number of minutes people spend on social-networking sites has increased 83 percent year over year, according to Nielsen Online. In fact, total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year over year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009, making it the number-one social-networking site for the month.

“We have seen some major growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace. Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way, perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space,” said Jon Gibs, vice president of online media and agency insights for Nielsen.

“The one thing that is clear about social networking is that regardless of how fast a site is growing or how big it is, it can quickly fall out of favor with consumers,” he said. “Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment’s notice.”

MySpace Wins with Video

It seems Facebook has become the top dog in the social-networking space — April was the fourth month in a row that Facebook held the top spot in both unique visitors and total minutes — but MySpace has been winning in online video.

With 120.8 million video streams, MySpace.com was the number-one social-networking destination when ranked by streams and total minutes spent viewing video. MySpace visitors spent 384 million minutes viewing video on the site, with an average of 38.8 minutes per viewer. In comparison, Facebook visitors spent only 113.5 million minutes viewing…

Harvard’s shocking fiscal incompetence, a cave of hobos in L.A., murderous robots, and innate female aggression: it’s been a fun week in human nature, if you trust the stories that have gone viral on the social news sites. Check out the best of them below.

Woman Gambles Away Investors’ Money. Literally.

According to the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis, a Minnesota woman collected an undisclosed amount of money from investors–millions–and proceeded to take it to Las Vegas and blow it all on “sports betting and table gaming.” (Kalin Dao, fraudster, left.)

Apparently thinking that cable news metaphors about heavy hitters “gambling” with investor funds were to be literally interpreted, Dao used money from new investors to pay dividends to old ones, and wasted the rest forming her rep as a casino high roller. She got away with the Ponzi scheme for nearly three years. Victims insinuate she got away with it because she was small, friendly, smart and seemingly harmless, due to an physical disability that caused her to walk with a limp.

Harvard’s Dumb Bets

The Atlantic has a fascinating piece on the unsound (and heavily leveraged) investment strategies of America’s top university, the sum of which lost it $11 billion this year. Harvard’s total endowment stands at $25 billion, after topping out at over $30 billion. And while that’s a massive loss, the school is still very much in the money. Writer Derek Thompson suggests that current administrators may use the loss to renew their campaign for donations. Even so, it’s always interesting to see the smartest guys in the room can make the very same dumb decisions as the rest of the non-Ivied populace. 

Bar-hopping? Bring Your Ugly Friend

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely discusses how we (often stupidly) make decisions based on faulty information from our eyes and ears, and faulty processing in the room upstairs. Among the phenomena: when given a choice between two good-looking men and a third unattractive man who resembles one of the others, women will choose the better-looking man of the ugly-handsome dyad most of the time.

Microsoft’s New Search Engine Gets Unlikely Approval

Rebranding is a dangerous game; do it right, and consumers will love something old as if it’s new again, but do it wrong and you can inspire incredible antipathy. Redmond unveiled its latest re-brand on Thursday at the conference All Things D. Live Search will now be known as Bing, an updated version of Microsoft’s search engine that will try (again) to take on Google and Yahoo. Luckily for MSFT, Bing has plenty of new features that should generate some curiosity. “That was the most astounding software demo I’ve ever seen,” said Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, calling himself a “big fan” of Bing. An auspicious early review, if ever there was one. Then again, this guy rides a Segway.

LA County Raids Homeless Colony Under Highway

Apparently, there is a one-mile stretch of unlit space under the number 10 freeway in L.A. know as the “Cave,” where hundreds of vagrants live and use drugs. The Los Angeles Times says it’s an area as big as two high school gyms, and littered with trash and used needles. This week, teams of deputies descended into the Cave with guns drawn, looking to clear the area of its inhabitants. For a description that will surely make you want to skip dinner, keep reading. “Flashlight beams picked up mounds of scrap metal, bicycle parts, knives, syringes and an M-16 ammo clip,” the article says. “They found thick sections of concrete wall had been chiseled away to create little rooms. They found a man sleeping near the rotting carcass of what appeared to be a cat.”

Why Are Women So Bitchy to Each Other?

Researchers are studying aggression between women, according to an article in Scientific American. The phenomenon of angsty, hormonal teenage girls scorning one another in the high school cafeteria has become common suburban lore, but it’s also supported by data collected about passive conflicts between reproductive-aged women. Boys may fight more, the data says, but women engage in different and complex social aggression. The question is: is the behavior innate, and is it increasing?

Can Robots Form Societies?

A group of Swiss researchers is studying whether groups of robots can develop alliances and commit “evil” behavior in the pursuit of survival when resources are scarce. Hauntingly, they can: some of the simple, miniature bots warn others of danger and share food, but others intentionally trick competing robots into starvation or death.

Microsoft had the honor of the first major keynote at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles Monday, and got the much-anticipated conference off to a rousing start. The Redmond-based software giant introduced a number of new innovative features for its high-end gaming console, the Xbox 360, including social-networking features, a controllerless system for interacting with games, and 10 new titles.

“Today with cultural visionaries at our side and controller-free gaming on our horizon, Xbox 360 authored a new page in home entertainment history,” said Don Mattrick, senior vice president for the interactive entertainment business at Microsoft. “For us, this E3 is about breaking down barriers — between generations, between games and entertainment, and, most important, between video-game players and everyone else — in a way that only Xbox 360 can.”

Tweet Hot Lead, Alien Scum!

Already widely (and somewhat unfairly) mocked for its use as a diary of the banal, the micro-blog site Twitter is on the verge of being invaded by Xbox 360 high scores, running battle updates, and Easter egg tips. Microsoft said Monday that users will be able to post directly to the service from the Xbox 360 Live Dashboard.

Twitter isn’t the only social-networking service to come on board. In addition, the Xbox 360 will take advantage of the Facebook Connect service to allow gamers to link Xbox Live Friends with Facebook Friends, and to post updates to that service as well. Beginning with an upcoming edition of the golf game Tiger Woods, for instance, users will be able to share their favorite video-game screenshots with their online buddies.

Finally, Microsoft said, the Xbox 360 is getting music capability through a new partnership with Live.fm, an Internet radio provider. The service will be automatically available to Xbox Live Gold subscribers at the end of the year.

One existing partnership — with…