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Videos come in different sizes, resolutions and aspect ratios; the problem is, so do screens. Try to watch a video shot in a boxy 4:3 width to heighth ratio on your 16:9 HDTV, and things are going to look a little stretched out. Alternatively, you can have your 4:3 image appear in the middle of your 16:9 screen with black margins on the side or enlarge the image to fill the screen, which will necessarily cut off some content.

Resizing video has become more annoying as more people watch on mobile screens of varying sizes, but apparently Google Research has been working on a fix. Today Google Research announced an algorithm for resizing videos that will preserve the width to heighth ratio for "salient" images while squishing and stretching the "non-salient" parts of the shot.

If Google's mission is to organize the whole world's information, it makes sense for the company to look a few steps ahead. Today the Google Research team highlighted seven academic researchers whose work has captured the company's imagination.

Juan E. Vargas, who works at Google's University Relations department, says submissions to the company's University Research Awards program are at an all-time high. He summarized some of the most interesting scientific work the company has seen lately in a blog post today; the projects range from using Street View to construct semantically-marked up 3D models of cities to sending camera kits to kids in developing countries so they can learn some engineering and share photos with the world online. These are the scientific projects Google believes could make the world, and its business, better.