The search engine has collaborated with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services to add a Google Maps' service that will locate the nearest seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccine programs. Just go to this site and enter your city or postal code. Google says that the project has just started, so there are still locations with no information:

At the moment we have data for locations of flu vaccine directly from 20 states and counting. We are also continuing to add information from chain pharmacies and other providers in all 50 states; today, you'll find results from chains such as Walgreens, CVS and PDX participants, such as Kmart, Duane Reade, WinnDixie and Giant Eagle.

After reading about the many problems with the vaccine in countries like Sweden—where they have top notch healthcare—I think I will pass on this round, thank you very much.

In a blog post from May, Carmack says he loves that players port Doom to every device imaginable, but he's disappointed that there's rarely any real effort to build a new, functional control scheme on platforms without a keyboard and mouse. In other words, he'd rather that instead of everyone stopping at "Does it run Doom?" they ask "Does it play Doom?"

That's why he personally developed the controls for the iPhone version, and according to early reviews, the iPhone can now play Doom. Users are saying controls as good as you would expect from Carmack. Not to mention the other enhancements like 24-bit lighting.

Sure, you might have put the game on your jailbroken iPhone years ago, but graphical upgrades and tighter controls might make it worth the $6.99 admission price. [Recombu]

As the first trailer seemed to promise, yes, this is a very impressive game. Graphics and sound are top-notch and the production as a whole befits its price. The main issue with Resurrection is the control scheme: even though other iPhone FPSes have pulled of decent free-movement control systems—including id's own Wolfenstein port—this game is, strictly speaking, on rails.

To be honest, this can be frustrating, especially given how well the environments are rendered. I mean, they're right there, in full, detailed 3D, and you can't explore them. The gameplay's saving grace is accelerometer support, which at least lets you aim and shake off zombies in an intuitive way.

As for the claims that this is a totally new installment in the Doom franchise, they're technically true: the story is fresh, and so are the levels. But aside from the new story meat and new gameplay dynamics, Resurrection borrows liberally from Doom III, looking, sounding and, to an extent, feeling like its 2004 predecessor. Impressive? Sure. Worth $10? If so, then barely. [via Will Smith's Twitter]

This guy has managed to get an open source, hardware-accelerated version of Doom running on his Pre, leveraging yesterday's full leak of a WebOS root image, which gave hackers and developers access to core elements of OS that won't be accessible with their MojoSDK. Granted, you'd expect Doom to run on the Pre accelerated or not, but at the very least it's a hopeful sign of things to come. [Sargund]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Some are already hailing it as a "true next generation game" for the iPhone, and it does have some fairly impressive graphics, as far as the platform goes. But with iPhone 3GS on its way, with a more powerful graphics processor and support for a newer version of OpenGL, isn't this an odd time to market an iPhone game on its up-to-the-minute visuals and performance?

iD head John Carmack doesn't think so, telling Venturebeat that the game, like other Doom titles before it, will grow into new hardware. He specifically mentions the possibility of multiplayer with OS 3.0, but doesn't talk about whether or not the game content will adapt to the 3G S. [Venturebeat, Talking About Games]

In case you have not been paying attention to the news during the last few days, there's a pandemia going on. A spike of infections of the H1N1 Swine Flu—a mutation of a pork virus that jumped from pigs to humans—happened in the city of Mexico (103 dead already) and it is quickly spreading through the world now, thanks to airline connections.

Reading the map is very simple: We are all going to dieThe pink markers are suspect, the purple markers are confirmed, and deaths don't have a black dot in the marker. The yellow markers are negative, but I don't see any.

Have fun watching. While you can (added another map, which is getting updated faster.)

View 2009 H1N1 Flu Outbreak Map in a larger map

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

P.S. Stupid Apophis can't reach us in time! Hahahaha. Ha. But it looks like pigs are getting their revenge for all these centuries of crispy bacon and pork buns. [Google Maps]

Bonus post soundtrack:

Energy could be harnessed from eternal sources, like the sun, the wind, or the seas. But there is only a limited amount of elements in planet Earth and—what's worst—bringing them from other planets will prove impractical with our current technology (and the technology that will be available in the next century).

In the meantime, copper—which is everywhere around you—will be gone in about 61 years; antimony—widely used in medicines—will be depleted in 20 years; while indium, rhodium, platinum, or silver—which are present in many essential consumer electronics—won't last much longer. And those estimations are only valid if we manage to consume half of what we are consuming now.

So, unless we really push technology forward, dramatically increase our recycling rhythm, or something extraordinary happens first—like Apophis obliterating us or the Large Hadron Collider blows us to another dimension, or Nazi zombies getting out of their crypts to make bacon of all of us—we and our children are going to have a really hard time pushing the world forward.

I guess we will have to keep taking life one weekend at a time. [New Scientist via Dark Roasted Blend]

There is a case to be made that dark, dormant comets are a significant but largely unseen hazard.

That's University of Cardiff's Professor Bill Napier talking to New Scientist magazine. Dark comets almost don't reflect any light from the sun because all the ice around them is gone, leaving only a dark organic ball of organic crap. There are a whooping 3,000 of them around, but only 25 have been detected.

Professor Napier's fellow Zarkov Dr David Asher at the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland agrees, so does Southwest Research Institute comet expert Clark Chapman. One example: In 1983 the comet IRAS-Araki-Alcock-with only 1 percent of its surface reflecting Sun's light-passed Earth at only five million kilometers, which is the closest encounter in 200 years.

So let's recapitulate here. We have Apophis, a doomsday unknown asteroid that like Pink Floyd, the Large Hadron Collider, Al Gore's overheating pants, Woz dancing with the stars,and now Dark Comets.

Thank you Mr. Scientists-not-named-Zarkov. You gave me yet another reason not to do my homework, get drunk, and have sex until I drop dead this weekend. [Daily Mail]

Asked if Microsoft would counter with a “Zune Phone”, Mr Ballmer said: “You should not anticipate that.” He added that the company would stick to its strategy of developing software to support a range of mobile devices. That suggests that, if there is a future for Zune, it lies in planting the software and online service linked to the player in other devices.

Ballmer believes that software is what Microsoft does best, so they need to put that software in as many third-party devices as possible, rather than focusing on their own dedicated music device, a market that he believes is declining. [Financial Times via Alley Insider]

Following Erica Sadun's article on how to enable the iPhone's undocumented TV-out features, Troughton-Smith came up with the idea of avoiding the iPhone screen except to draw the controls necessary to navigate through Doom's corridors. [Infinite Loop]

Now, just to summarize, before we get to the depressing part, the IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) was conceived to study the farthest reaches of our solar system. At the very edge is the termination shock, where the system ends, and deep space begins. Studying the unknown will always be cool, but it turns out the IBEX mission could also lead to a better understanding of our future doom.

The termination shock is also the point at which the sun's solar wind begins to taper off, and eventually end. Much like our atmosphere here on Earth, the solar wind protects the solar system from the deadly radiation that saturates deep space. It does this by hurling ions in every direction, at 1 million miles per hour, all the time. Scientists believe the solar wind stops about 90% of the radiation from reaching the planets housed within the termination shock.

The trouble is these winds have fallen to their weakest levels in 50 years. In the past 10 years, the wind's intensity weakened by about 25%. Why? Who knows. Hence, IBEX.

Said David McComas, IBEX chief scientist, "We don't believe we're in imminent danger, but we've only measured the solar wind for about 50 years." Reassuring, thy name be NASA. [Bloomberg]

The small team at id means that the company can only work on one game at a time, so they are toying with the idea of pairing up with a publishing partner to get a game running on the iPhone. However, Hollenshead is taking a cautious approach. He explains that games on the iPhone "are going to be competing with all of those other things you can do on the iPhone that are pretty cool" and that "It does raise the bar on what you need to do from a game standpoint."

So, when analyzing statements from Carmack and Hollenshead together, it seems that id Software definitely wants to bring games to the iPhone, but the two leaders have different viewpoints on the situation. Carmack is gung-ho and talking exclusive titles that are a "graphical tour de force" while Hollenshead is cautious and talking about porting titles that are already in development. We will just have to wait and see who gets their way. [Kotaku]

[The Big Picture]

There are enough ifs involved in the situation to make the likelihood pretty slim, but this is definitely one of those situations that astronomers are keeping a careful eye on. It all revolves around WR 104, a humungous star classified as a Wolf Rayet star. Generally, these blow up as a supernova, which is no biggie. But sometimes, they blow up as gamma-ray bursts. What's that mean?

When a very massive star explodes, the inner core collapses, forming a black hole, while the outer layers explode outwards. Due to a complex and fierce collusion of forces in the core, two beams of raw fury can erupt out of the star, mind-numbing in their power. Composed mostly of high-energy gamma rays, they can carry more energy in them than the Sun will put out in its entire lifetime. They are so energetic we can see them clear across the Universe, and having one too close would be bad.

Models of a GRB exploding at roughly the same distance indicate that the immediate impacts are damage to the ozone layer, and the creation of nitrogen dioxide, which is basically smog. Gamma rays emitted by the burst would hit ozone molecules and shatter them, and models indicate that a GRB at this distance could deplete the ozone layer by 30% globally, with local pockets depleted by 50%. It would take years for the ozone to recover from that. Note that the ozone holes we have been dealing with the past few years are actually depletions of less than 5%. Obviously, this is a big deal.

The Flikr page reads, "Heck, it's Texas, what did you expect?" Nothing less, Texas. Nothing less, whatsoever. [Flickr via Born Rich]

Think of it as a Hello World app but with satanic monsters attacking your defenseless body. We do, however, very much look forward to blasting away hellspawn with the touch of a finger. A middle finger. [Google Code —Thanks Dennis and everyone else!]