Reports of my death at the hands of the Telus meerkats are greatly exaggerated.

Bloomberg mistakenly published the template for Apple CEO Steve Job's obituary on Thursday. Sure, it only went out on a corporate newswire and had blanks to fill in for Job's age and cause of death, but in this age of the interwebs it was bound to leak out. Jobs previously had cancer but at this point will probably be dancing on the graves of his company's competition. Those of you in Canada have probably seen Telus' brilliant reaction to the increasingly ubiquitous iPhone: Meerkats who apparently have learned to use the company's smartphone offerings from RIM and Palm.

Microsoft is once again in the news for all the wrong reasons. The latest release of Internet Explorer, IE8 Beta 2, is still having troubles despite some of the most glaring bugs being squashed. Ars Technica walks us through the good, bad and ugly of the browser and concludes that it's still a year or more behind rivals Firefox, Safari, and Opera in terms of features. What irks me most is that IE8 Beta 2 apes Firefox 3's "awesome bar" which integrates bookmark functions and searches you browsing history right from the address bar. It baffles me that Microsoft would choose to copy a feature that many Firefox users don't even like (I find it quite useful, but it depends on your browsing habits). Hard to believe that this is all that's left of the browser that won the browser wars of the late 1990's.

Now on to another of my favorite subjects, gamma radiation. The science team for the Fermi spacecraft has released their first gamma-ray map of the sky, using the first 90 minutes of observations. Such a map takes weeks to compile from the ground due to most of the incoming radiation being deflected (thankfully) by the atmosphere. The speed of the space-based observations makes it possible to study black holes and gamma ray bursts in detail not previously possible.

A Japanese research team has announced that a type of stem cells can be extracted from the pulp inside wisdom teeth. The cells can only form certain types of tissue and are therefore less useful than embroynic stem cells, but it does get one around a host of ethical problems.

And finally, Apple has renewed our hope in the long anticipated (but largely mythical) tablet Mac, thanks to a patent filing that deals with future developments of the companies multi-touch technology. The filing includes a drawing of what is either an iPhone for giants or, in fact, the long-awaited iTablet.