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Google has announced the second annual Google Science Fair, an online science competition opened to students aged 13-18 from anywhere in the world. Google touts this as "the largest online science competition in the world," and it touts CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American as partners.

Participants can have up to three partners. They pose a question, develop a hypothesis, test it with an experiment and submit the findings online. Last year's winners became scientific superheroes, meeting the president, speaking at TEDx Women, just generally kicking butt. There are also prizes, including a $50,000 college scholarship, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic or an internship at Google or any of the partner organizations.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Google is going back to China. Two years ago, facing censorship from the Chinese government, Google pulled out of mainland China, redirecting users to uncensored results from Hong Kong. Google took a stand against China's authoritarian regime, but it did so reluctantly. China is too tempting a market for Google to write off.

Nevertheless, the WSJ reports that Google is hiring more engineers, salespeople and product managers and building new consumer Web services. As China's mobile market booms, Google is pushing Android there, and opening a Chinese Android Market for mobile apps is one of the top priorities.

Pop quiz: The Political Action Committee for which of the following companies has given the most in donations to lawmakers who have co-sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate-counterpart, the Protect IP Act: Microsoft, eBay, Google, GoDaddy, Yahoo! or Amazon?

Think carefully: all six have come out in opposition to the bill, which would put tight restrictions on Internet firms in an effort to enforce U.S. copyright laws (although some firms took more convincing stands than others). At least two of the companies, Google and Amazon, have said they may go dark to protest the bill.

If you guessed GoDaddy, which had a public dust up after initially supporting SOPA, you're right. Sort of. GoDaddy's PAC leads in percentage, giving 52.9% of the $38,750 it has given during this election cycle to Representatives that have signed on to co-sponsor SOPA and Senators who are co-sponsoring PIPA.

Old-line media companies are scrambling to partner with Web companies in their efforts to cover the 2012 election.

In Iowa, Fox News unveiled an exclusive partnership with Google. NBC News and Facebook have expanded a partnership to cover political polling. The Daily Beast is also working in cahoots with NBC.

Partnerships between media companies are nothing new: print publications have a long history of partnering with broadcast outlets on political polls and other news coverage. The question for these new media partnerships is who benefits? Viewers and readers, to an an extent, will always benefit from broader coverage, but in this case it may be the Web companies that are getting a bigger boost.

It may take awhile to figure out if Google has alienated some of its long-term search fans with yesterday's launch of Your World. But if they did, Microsoft's Bing may be poised to pick up some of the castoffs.

Jon Mitchell has details on Your Way, but in a nutshell, the new service better integrates Google+ content into Google search. That could have some looking for more objective ways to search, while also raising the ire of some big Web players.

Six of the leading Republican presidential candidates have spent a combined $1.4 million on online advertising so far during the 2012 election cycle.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama's reelection campaign has already spent $5.8 million on Internet advertising - more than the campaign has spent on media consultants, broadcast, print and miscellaneous media combined, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Google announced yesterday that its layered 3D browser of the human body has become an open-source project. Google Body was built by Google engineers in their "20% time" - the 1/5th of Googlers' time and energy they can devote to creative projects - of which all other human beings are jealous.

Zygote Media Group, which provided the imagery for Google's modeling, has built Zygote Body with the code. It offers the same navigation and features. To support this launch, the Google Body team has built a new, open-source 3D viewer at open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com. Thanks to the work of Google engineers, any developer can now use the same kind of 3D model browser for her or his own project.

Google shipped some major changes to search today. The announcement was called "Search, plus Your World." It was the inevitable launch of the integration between Google's core product, Web search, and its new identity service, Google+. There are now two modes of search on Google, personal and global. Personal search shows users stuff from their Google+ circles, and global search is good old Google search, albeit with public Google+ posts included.

Before today, Google+ was shoved into Web search in uncomfortable ways. Public Google+ posts interfered with natural search when users were logged in. It looked like Google was going to force its social product into its users' lives. But that's not how it turned out. Today's updates put Google users' identities into their own hands.

Speed counts, and nobody knows that better than Google. The latest tweak to provide better performance comes in the form of adopting a new compression type that promises to yield files about 15% smaller than using Gzip to compress fonts. If you're already using Google's Web Fonts, what do you need to do to get the improvements? Nothing!

If you're attending the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week and have an Android phone, you'll be able to use Google Maps to navigate inside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Select resorts and casinos on the Las Vegas strip are also covered, as is McCarran International Airport.

Google has also partnered with some Las Vegas-area Best Buy stores, so it can guide gadget-addled convention-goers straight to the cash register. Today's update also releases the floor plans of some of the first locations submitted to Google.