Searching the Internet may help middle-aged and older adults keep their memories sharp, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles studied people doing Web searches while their brain activity was recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging scans.

“What we saw was people who had Internet experience used more of their brain during the search,” Dr. Gary Small, a UCLA expert on aging, said in a telephone interview.

“This suggests that just searching on the Internet may train the brain — that it may keep it active and healthy,” said Small, whose research appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Joost’s relaunch, which will let users watch shows like “Friends” or “The Daily Show” directly on the Web, comes as YouTube also is beginning to offer full-length, commercial-supported television shows in addition to the shorter clips it’s best known for.

Previously, Joost users had to download the site’s free software to be able to watch its programming, but the step was cumbersome. Now the company is scrapping its original setup in favor of Flash video, which has long been used by Hulu, YouTube and other sites.

Joost Chief Executive Mike Volpi said the site’s social features have also been enhanced. People can see what their friends are watching on Joost and create groups around TV shows, characters or artists. Users will also be able to post a news feed of their and their friends’ activities on Joost to other Web sites, such as social networks like Facebook.

“In order to really enhance the viewing experience and differentiate the Internet from TV, you can’t just regurgitate TV,” Volpi said. “You have to engage the community. Ultimately, the Internet is about community-building.”

Still, without content, the community won’t have a whole lot to talk about, so Joost is also growing its library of TV shows, movies and music videos. The company — which was started by the creators of Skype and the music-sharing service Kazaa — has more than 46,000 professionally produced videos from the likes of CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. It plans to show the full lineup of fall shows from CBS.

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Yahoo Inc. launched a much-anticipated upgrade to its online advertising system Wednesday as it tries to bring to graphical display ads some of the innovations that powered Google Inc.’s rapid rise in search marketing.

Playing to Yahoo’s strengths in display ads and technology targeting pitches to users’ interests, the new “Apt from Yahoo” platform will initially involve just the newspaper companies in a 2-year-old consortium led by Yahoo. Many of the papers joined that effort hoping for relief from the decline in their industry.

The platform, renamed from Amp because of a trademark conflict, is intended to make it easier for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell display ads, borrowing self-service techniques that have made text-based search ads lucrative for Internet companies, especially Google.

By tapping data Yahoo already collects on users’ locations, demographics and surfing habits, Apt aims to help advertisers narrow their pitches to specific groups of customers because sharper targeting will let Web sites charge more for ads.

Yahoo Inc is moving ahead on Thursday with a radical redesign of its home page — the most heavily trafficked site on the Web — making changes that give users a personalized view of the wider Web.

The Internet media giant is under the gun to deliver on year-old promises to transform Yahoo from a network of more or less insular properties into “starting points” that help consumers quickly navigate their way to the rest of the Web.

“We are going to put what matters to you most at your fingertips,” said Tapan Bhat, the senior vice president in charge of “front doors” — the main destinations at Yahoo, including Yahoo.com, MyYahoo and the Yahoo toolbar.

The new Yahoo home page features a tab on the left hand column of the page with sophisticated links to the user’s 10 or 20 favorite sites. It functions as an alternative to navigation methods like bookmarks, link bars or browser tabs, he said.

In its simplest sense, Yahoo is blending the broadcast, editorially-controlled view that Yahoo.com has long offered with the personalized, self-selected view of information that the company’s MyYahoo service has long offered. It mixes things users know they want, with the serendipitous or unexpected.

“For the first time, we are going to marrying those two to take the best of both,” Bhat promised.

Amazon.com said on Monday that its subsidiary, Internet Movie Database, would allow users to watch feature films and TV shows for no charge on its Web site, imdb.com.

Over 6,000 titles will be available, the company said, citing recent episodes of popular television shows like “24″ and “Heroes” or classic films like “Some Like It Hot.”

IMDB also said that the first episodes of new fall television shows like “Lipstick Jungle” and “30 Rock” will be available for free viewing before their first air date.

Mozilla is responding to challenges from browser rivals Apple, Microsoft and Google by reviving private browsing mode features in Firefox.

The approach has been considered before but was sidelined in the run-up to the release of Firefox 3.0. However, the inclusion of similar privacy protecting features in Apple’s Safari and, more recently Google Chrome and IE 8 beta 2, has revived interest in the approach and spurred a decision to incorporate the technology in the first beta of Firefox 3.1, due out next month. The decision was made at a meeting of Mozilla developers on Tuesday.

Private browsing, more memorably described as ‘porn mode’, makes it easier to hide a user’s surfing from others using the same machine. A history of sites visited in this mode is not recorded and cookies are purged at the end of a session. In addition, content isn’t cached and passwords entered won’t be autosaved.

Scientists in Pisa, Italy claim to have set a new world record for the fastest wireless data transmission. They report that during an uninterrupted 12-hour experiment, they were able to achieve throughput speeds above 1.2 Terabits per second; which they say beats the previous wireless data transmission speed record of 160 Gigabits per second by Korean scientists. The researchers claim that speeds of this magnitude can typically only be achieved using fiber optics.

According to research conducted by StatCounter, Google’s new browser, Chrome, has taken 1% of the global browser market within a day of launch.

Google’s unusual step of publicising the Chrome browser on its notoriously clutter-free homepage is an indication of the plans that Google has for this browser…

“This is a phenomenal performance,” commented Aodhan Cullen, “this is war on Microsoft but the big loser could be Firefox.”

While Google may have the Internet Explorer market share in its sights, the fact that many Firefox users are more “mobile” as far as browser use is concerned, may impact on the current Firefox market share.

Most consumers probably associate eBay Inc. more with vintage lunch boxes and low-priced electronics than with laptop bags made from recycled plastic by women in New Delhi.

The online auction operator is trying to change that perception with WorldofGood.com, a Web site due to launch Wednesday to sell goods produced with social and environmental goals in mind.

EBay developed the site with World of Good Inc., a startup focused on “ethical supply chains” behind consumer products, and licensed the group’s name for the marketplace. World of Good will get a share of the revenue from the site, which had been operating for the past six months as an online community focused on the social impact of business.

The site will sell fixed-price goods that purportedly have some positive effect on people and the planet. The goal is to help consumers align their social values with their shopping decisions, WorldofGood.com general manager Robert Chatwani said.

The owner of an opposition Internet news site in Russia’s volatile Ingushetia region was shot and killed Sunday after being detained by police.

Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the www.Ingushetiya.ru Web site, was arrested at Nazran airport in southern Russia after disembarking a flight, according to a statement by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. Yevloyev was later found dumped on the side of the road, suffering from a gunshot wound to the head, the news site’s deputy editor, Ruslan Khautiyev, told the Associated Press. Yevloyev later died at a hospital, Khautiyev said.

Yevloyev had angered the region’s Kremlin-backed administration with bold criticism of police treatment of civilians in the region, the AP reported. A court in June accused him of spreading “extremist” statements and ordered him to close his site, but it reappeared under a different name.

The Russian prosecutor general’s office said it would open an investigation into the “incident.”

“While police officers were attempting to transfer M. Yevloyev to an Interior Ministry office, an incident occurred,” said Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigative committee of the prosecutor general’s office, according to the Interfax news agency. “M. Yevloyev received a gunshot wound to the temple area.”

A lawyer for Yevloyev ridiculed the explanation and said police dumped Yevloyev on a road after shooting him.

Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable operator, said on Thursday it will cap customers’ Internet usage starting October 1, in a bid to ensure the best service for the vast majority of its subscribers.

Comcast said it was setting a monthly data usage threshold of 250 gigabytes per account for all residential high-speed Internet customers, or the equivalent of 50 million e-mails or 124 standard-definition movies.

“If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast’s Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use,” according to the company’s updated Frequently Asked Questions on Excessive Use.

Customers who top 250 GB in a month twice in a six-month timeframe could have service terminated for a year.