Andy Murray wins Wimbledon, ends 77-year British drought

WIMBLEDON, England — No need to chin up, England. Wimbledon is yours again.

On a brilliantly sunny Sunday afternoon, No. 2 Andy Murray knocked off top-ranked Novak Djokovic 6-4, 7-5, 6-4, ending 77 years of British anxiety.

Scotland's Murray, 26, is the first British man to win Wimbledon since Fred Perry won the last of three consecutive in 1936.

One year after a crushing defeat to Roger Federer in the Wimbledon final, Murray returned to the All England Club lawns to capture his second Grand Slam title after last year's U.S. Open, where he beat Serbia's Djokovic in five sets.

Murray also won last year's Olympic gold medal at Wimbledon, and ran his unbeaten string on grass to 18-0.

Meeting in their fourth major final — and third in less than a year – the world's top two players and defensive standouts exchanged many grueling groundstroke rallies. A few went 30 shots or more.

Murray was steadier, taking advantage of the Djokovic's lackluster serving and bouts of error-prone play.

He seemed energized by the nearly 15,000 fans on sold-out Centre Court and thousands more watching the big screen from the grounds, storming back from a 1-4 second set deficit to put six-time major winner Djokovic on the ropes.

After dropping his first four Grand Slam finals, Murray, who skipped the French Open with a bad back, ran his record to 2-6, having lost to Djokovic in January's Australian Open final.

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'Supermoon' Full Moon Rises Tonight: Watch It Live Online

The biggest and brightest full moon of 2013 graces Earth's skies tonight (June 23), and armchair astronomers can get great views of this "supermoon" without even leaving the comfort of their homes.

The online Slooh Space Camera will air a free supermoon webcast tonight at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT on June 24), featuring live high-definition views of Earth's nearest neighbor as seen by an observatory in the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa.

You can watch the Slooh supermoon webcast on SPACE.com, or follow the action at Slooh's website.

Supermoons occur because the moon's path around Earth is slightly elliptical. Distances between the two bodies vary from 225,622 miles (363,104 kilometers) at the closest lunar approach — known as perigee — to 252,088 miles (405,696 km) at the most distant point, called apogee.

When perigee and a full moon coincide, the result is a supermoon, which appears about 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than a full moon at apogee.

"This unusual perfect confluence of lunar perigee and full moon will create the highest tides of the year," Bob Berman, contributing editor and monthly columnist for Astronomy magazine, said in a statement. Berman will participate in Sunday's hourlong show, along with a Slooh broadcast team.

"We can expect expose-the-sand lows and lap-the-boardwalk highs on Sunday and especially Monday, since the oceans usually require a day to catch up with the behavior of the moon," Berman added.

Tonight's supermoon comes just two days after the northern summer solstice, when the sun appeared to shine farthest to the north of the equator. Friday (June 21) was the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and marked the start of summer there. (It signaled the beginning of winter for folks in the Southern Hemisphere).

"This is thus a 'solstitial moon' as well. The visual effect is to make this the lowest-down full moon of 2013," Berman said. "And since lower moons tend to be orange-yellow or amber, shining as they do through more than twice as much reddening air and moisture, this lunar experience should give us a true 'honey moon' all night long. Moreover, lower moons look larger thanks to the famous 'moon illusion.'"

The "moon illusion" is a mysterious optical effect that makes the moon look much bigger when it rises behind objects on the horizon than it does high up in the sky.

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'The Sopranos' Star James Gandolfini Dead at 51

Actor James Gandolfini, best known for his portrayal of mob boss Tony Soprano in The Sopranos has died. He was 51.

HBO confirmed to on Wednesday that Gandolfini died while vacationing in Rome, Italy. Reports suggest the cause was a possible heart attack.

"We're all in shock and feeling immeasurable sadness at the loss of a beloved member of our family. He was [a] special man, a great talent, but more importantly a gentle and loving person who treated everyone no matter their title or position with equal respect," the network wrote in an emailed statement.

"He touched so many of us over the years with his humor, his warmth and his humility. Our hearts go out to his wife and children during this terrible time. He will be deeply missed by all of us."

Mark Armstrong and Nancy Sanders, Gandolfini's managers, also expressed their sadness.

"Our hearts are shattered and we will miss him deeply. He and his family were part of our family for many years and we are all grieving."

Gandolfini garnered widespread acclaim and three Emmy awards for his turn as the mercurial head of the Sopranos family. The HBO drama aired for eight years, from 1999 to 2007.

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Facebook Gets Hashtag Support

Hashtags are coming to Facebook to help users better surface conversations.

Support for the all-but-ubiquitous topic organization system was rumored in March and will roll out to a small percentage of users Wednesday. Facebook will roll out hashtags to more users in the coming weeks.

The social network wants to make it easier for users to find content already on Facebook, and functional hashtags are the first step. According to Facebook, many users already post hashtags anyway, so why not make them work. Hashtags will be both clickable and searchable, so, for example, topics like #NSALeaks or #NBAFinals will now exist.

Hashtags from other services, such as Instagram, are clickable as well. Users will also be able to compose posts directly from a hashtag feed and search results. That could make adding real-time content to specific streams easier than before.

Twitter user Chris Messina created in 2007 the hashtag as we know it today. Twitter eventually adopted the system of organizing tweets around a certain subject into its API and its broader ecosystem. Since then, the hashtag has been adopted by other services, including Flickr, Tumblr, Google+ and even Facebook-owned Instagram.

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Eyeball Licking: Fetish that makes teenagers sick

The popularity of the bizarre practice, sometimes called 'worming', has been blamed for a rise in cases of conjunctivitis. And it freaks us out just to think about it.

Warning: don't read this if you're eating, prone to sudden bouts of queasiness or unable to even think about Un Chien Andalou without simultaneously bursting into tears and dry-heaving. Believe me, I'm speaking from experience here.

Because this is an article about oculolinctus, an eye-licking fetish that is currently sweeping across the schools of Japan like, well, like a great big dirty bacteria-coated tongue sweeping across a horrific number of adolescent eyeballs.

Sometimes known as "worming" – which somehow makes this whole thing worse – oculolinctus is being blamed for a significant rise in Japanese cases of conjunctivitis and eye-chlamydia, which is actually a thing. It's apparently seen as a new second-base; the thing you graduate to when kissing gets boring.

The craze is thought to stem from a music video by Japanese emo band Born (there's a chance that the eyeball-licking scene was only included to distract everyone from the fact that the song sounds like it belongs on a menu screen for an EA Sports game about snowboarding from a decade ago, but at this point that's just speculation).

Tumblr, inevitably, is filling up with drawings and unnecessarily close-up photographs of the act, and YouTube is no stranger either. One theory about why it has taken off so spectacularly is down to the sheer number of nerve endings in the cornea. The eyeballs are incredibly sensitive because they need to detect grit and other small particles, and the sensation of oculolinctus is supposedly akin to that of toesucking.

Unwilling to try it myself – because my tongue isn't long enough, I don't want eye-chlamydia and just writing about this has made me retch uncontrollably – I can't tell you firsthand if that's true. Luckily, one student from the US Virgin Islands with an oculolinctus fetish has explained: "My boyfriend started licking my eyeballs years ago and I just loved it. I'm not with him any more but I still like to ask guys to lick my eyeballs ... it turns me on."

However, the dangers of oculolinctus are very real. As well as spreading pink-eye like nobody's business, there's also a risk of corneal scratching, which can lead to ulcers and blindness. Plus, there's a strong chance that you'll have to go to school the next day in an eye patch. At least with lovebites you could just throw on a poloneck jumper and be done with it.

Hopefully oculolinctus won't catch on here and will remain one of those peculiarly Japanese fads such as bagelheading (injecting saline into your forehead until it swells out of all proportion, yaeba (undergoing dental surgery to give you crooked teeth) and shippo (wearing a neurologically controlled tail that reveals your moods). Because frankly, if oculolinctus does ever make it to these shores, I'm never going to be able to look at a lychee again.

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All About the iOS 7

There is, I believe, a perfect mobile operating system, one ideal way of handling mobile activities on a smartphone or tablet. Apple, Google and Microsoft, maybe even Blackberry, are all headed to this common destination.

But on Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, Apple proved that it’s the furthest down that road. And that should surprise no one.

iOS 7, the most radical reimagining of iOS since its inception in 2007, was met with cheers of approval and, in some spots in the cavernous Moscone hall, standing ovations. From where I sat, it was deserved.

We all knew this was coming: A flattening of the interface: Less overt polish and skeuomorphism, a new look and feel brought to you by the architect of Apple aesthetic, Jony Ive. Personally, I was worried. Apple’s iPhone interface remains my favorite among smartphone platforms. I didn’t see enough wrong with it to require a rethink, but then I probably wasn’t thinking deeply enough about the mobile OS.

Taking away reflections and make-believe bubblish curves is not exactly a major accomplishment. In the case of iOS 7, it appears to be in service of radically different approach to interface mechanics. The new iOS is quite lovely — the new color palette manages to make a nearly entirely flat interface bright and bold. But clearly, the goal is for it to get out of the way.

By stripping away more than one layer of artifice, the user gets that much more quickly to what they really care about: the content, their contacts, the music, and their photos.

iOS 7 is not averse to a bit of flash. The new Safari method of handling browser tabs is both smart and spectacular. It’s like a rolodex with unlimited cards. Similarly, the new wallpapers don’t just sit behind your newly flat icons: You can turn the phone one way or another to see more of the wallpaper image behind the icons. It’s a neat trick, and about as glamorous as the new iOS gets.

Apple also manages with iOS 7 to undo its biggest design mistake: Game Center. I have no idea why they thought it should look like a craps table. Now it’s mostly white space and bubbles. That’s better, though I still think it was the one iOS 7 area that looked somewhat out of step with the rest of the OS.

Destination: Awesome Mobile OS

There’s a concerted effort in iOS 7 to not waste space or your time. More system apps, like Safari, are full screen. The new Control Center offers instant access to system features like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Airplane mode, ones I probably access multiple times every day. I usually have to dig into iOS settings to get to them. In iOS 7, you just swipe from the bottom. It's plain smart.

Speaking of smart, I’m excited to try out the new Photo app. It looks miles better than the current version, mostly because Apple seems to really understand how we use our iPhones and what happens with our overwhelming collection of on-device images. I want my phone to organize my images for me, because I know I never will.

Even Siri’s relatively minor enhancements were music to my ears. I love that she (or he) can now act on a system level. For as aware as the voice assistant was of the content on my phone and the web, I was always disappointed that Siri didn’t seem to know her own home –- the iPhone. Now I can tell her to change the brightness settings. I expect to be able to enact all sorts of hardware-level changes through voice control.

I also know I’m not the only iPhone user who will thank Apple for introducing auto-app updates. Yes, I know that those updates will probably have to happen when Wi-Fi is available. If it’s really smart, the phone won’t update big-ass apps like Asphalt 7 until you plug it in at night. Still, I won’t shed a tear when I say goodbye to that little AppStore message reminding me I have 57 apps updates to download and install.

There are plenty of under-the-hood enhancements, most notably smart app management (more cycles for your most-used apps) and multi-tasking across all apps. When we quizzed a developer about the day’s most important iOS enhancements, the first thing he mentioned was multitasking.

The Road to Perfect

Yes, there were moments when I recognized a little bit of other mobile OS’s in iOS 7 — probably no more so than when Apple showed off “Today.” The dark screen, crisp, white typography, and the effort to bring together all you should know about that day in one place: it reminded me of the way Windows Phone 8 collects all that you need to know about, say, connection activities.

The more these mobile OSes change, the more they become the same as each other. It's a sign that the mobile space is no longer fresh. It’s a mature business where consumers have a set of expectations about how things should work.

Each mobile OS I’ve seen this year is getting to that destination of the perfect mobile OS. I truly believe they’ll all meet in the middle. Visually, there will always be differences, but the way our smartphones work will be more and more the same.

The only question is how fast Apple, Google, Microsoft and Blackberry get there. Some come on a galloping horse, others a race car. And Apple? I think they may just have strapped a rocket ship onto iOS.

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Google Close to Buying Waze for $1.3 Billion

The bidding war for crowdsourced navigation app Waze has reportedly been won by Google, which will pay "more than $1 billion" for the startup, according to Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. Update: The newspaper later added that the deal will be worth $1.3 billion.

The deal hasn't been finalized yet, but according to the report, Google agreed not to lay off Waze workers at its development center in Israel, and will allow the company to continue its development in Israel "for at least three years."

According to the report, the conditions of the deal will keep Waze CEO Noam Bardin at the helm of the company, and Waze will retain its brand and won't be integrated into Google.

A deal for the free social-powered navigation app for iPhone has been in the works for a few months, with the bidding for Waze reportedly involving Facebook and Google.

On May 24, Apple was also rumored to be considering a bid for Waze earlier this year, but on May 28, Apple CEO Tim Cook denied that Apple made a bid for Waze.

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