Intellectual Ventures, led by former Microsoft exec and Modernist Cuisine mastermind Nathan Myhrvold, has taken Motorola to court over mobile products it says infringes upon patents it holds, including one for mobile devices contaning a CPU. Really?!

Patents! They're a big deal. Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures depends on patents to make money, and they file a lot of 'em. So I asked him how he'd change the patent system.

Nathan Myhrvold explains why failure is an option at Intellectual Ventures—and it has to be for any inventor, really. [Eureka on Gizmodo]

It's pretty simple, says Intellectual Ventures' Nathan Myhrvold—lots more things being invented means lots more inventions that succeed.

Intellectual Ventures founder and modern day Merlin Nathan Myhrvold explains why it costs a lot of damn money to create new ideas. Hint: Think Hollywood. [Eureka on Gizmodo]

"Did airplanes come from the R&D department of a train company or a steamship company?" Nathan Myhrvold asks, rhetorically, his voice cracking. He's explaining how his company, Intellectual Ventures, is going to reinvent the way things are invented.

A unit of Intellectual Ventures—the patent firm started by ex-Microsoft chief tech dude Nathan Myhrvold and funded partly by Bill Gates—called TerraPower is talking with Toshiba about using its nuclear reactor tech to build underground reactors.

In today's Remainders: tomorrow's news! Cisco's ushering in the next generation of internet with the CRS-3; Kempler & Strauss's futuristic PhoneWatch gets reviewed; geolocated Tweets; a WebKit-borrowing Firefox; an HTML 5 drawing app; Samsung's point and shoot prices, and more!

Not content with being the world's richest man, Bill Gates is planning on extending his power to control the weather. More specifically, he has filed a patent for a system that he hopes will prevent the next Katrina.

Bill Gates may love his Ford Focus, but he's got plans to improve on age-old combustion, applying—along with Nathan Myhrvold and others from the Intellectual Ventures gang—to patent a smart engine with electromagnetic pistons.