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The University of Nottingham woke up one morning and, after taking tea with talking badgers (which was the custom of the place), decided to produce and share sixty videos on astrophysics, each one allied to an astronomical symbol. Sixty Symbols was born.

Whether the symbol is a 70s medallion (minus chest hair) or a kitty (plenty of chest hair), whether it's pi (not apple) or apple (no pie), there's a video behind it.

For the first time ever, U.S. consumers report spending an equal amount of time using the Internet as they do watching TV. According to a report released by Forrester today, Gen Xers now claim to spend more time online than watching TV and Boomers now report spending an equal amount of time on both activities. Senior Boomers still report watching more television, and Generation Y has long reported spending more time online.

Earlier tonight, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on American TV news program 60 Minutes where he was interviewed by Leslie Stahl. In the interview, Zuckerberg talked about his life, his company, now worth an estimated $35 billion, and the Hollywood portrayal of Facebook's beginning's in the critically praised film "The Social Network."

60 Minutes also got a sneak peek at the new Facebook profile pages, which are being rolled out gradually, according to a post on the official Facebook blog. The new profile pages will be available to all of Facebook's 500 million users by early next year, says the company.

Tango, a cross-platform mobile video chat application, had a notable launch at the end of September 2010. Thanks to a high-profile review in the Wall St. Journal, the application was downloaded a million times within the first 10 days of its release. But did the downloads trail off as the hype died down?

No, they did not. Now, approximately 6 weeks later, Tango is reporting it has crossed the 3 million download mark and is available in 127 countries around the world. People want mobile video chat, it seems. But Tango isn't going to stop at mobile - the company is planning to bring Tango to all your screens - desktop, tablet, mobile and TV.

The world's largest Internet retailer Amazon.com is known for many things besides shopping - Kindle eBook readers, for example, or its cloud computing infrastructure known as Amazon Web Services - but Amazon as a movie studio? That one seemed to come out of left field, didn't it?

Well, it's true - kind of. Amazon is indeed getting into the movie-making business with the launch of a new portal called Amazon Studios, but it's not a traditional studio by any means.

Having just emerged from private beta earlier this month, online video hub Hulu is now lowering the price for its premium service "Hulu Plus" in an effort to lure in more users. Previously, Hulu Plus was $9.99 per month, but today it's dropping to $7.99 per month. Current customers who had been paying the higher rate will get a refund for the difference on their next billing cycle, the company says.

In addition, Hulu Plus is now also available on the Roku brand of media center devices, which start at $59.99. Subscribers will also pay the new $7.99 rate if they want to stream Hulu content via Roku to their television sets.

Mobile industry executives from several companies spoke about the challenges of mobile video at this morning's Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco. On hand were Anthony Melone, CTO of Verizon Wireless, Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB.com and Hossein Moiin, CTO of Nokia Siemens Networks. The panelists, moderated by Ann Winblad, Managing Director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, talked about mobile video, streaming challenges, the future of LTE/4G and, perhaps most importantly, how are businesses going to charge for all this mobile video content?

A few people from Facebook's database teams (yes, plural) recently gave a MySQL Tech Talk at Facebook headquarters about how Facebook uses MySQL to process 13 million queries per second. Former Facebook CTO and Quora founded Adam D'Angelo has said that Facebook is "stuck" with PHP and MySQL for legacy reasons, but it sure sounds the Facebook team is making the best of it. Video and notes after the jump.

Google's mobile operating system known as Android was officially unveiled on November 5th, 2007, making today Android's 3rd birthday. It's fair to say that this mobile platform has taken the world by storm - in just a few years time, it's gone from a non-dominant player in the mobile OS market to the top smartphone platform in the U.S. and number two in the world. There are even predictions that it will overtake Nokia for the top slot worldwide by 2014.

Let's see how it got there, shall we?

Hulu Plus, the premium version of online video hub Hulu, has now opened its doors to all interested users, according to a post this morning on the company's corporate blog.

Says Rob Wong, Director of Product for Hulu, users no longer need an invitation to sign up for Hulu Plus. Also, the service will roll out next week to Sony PS3 owners with a PlayStation network account.