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Ever wanted to know how the different companies were named? Here is an interesting primer.

Mercedes: This was actually financier's daughter's name. Adobe: This came from the name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock. Apple Computers: It was the favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobbs.He was three months late for filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock.

This stunning image shows remarkable and mysterious details near the dark central region of a planet-sized sunspot in one of the sharpest views ever of the surface of the Sun. Just released, the picture was made using the Swedish Solar Telescope now in its first year of operation on the Canary Island of La Palma . Along with features described as hairs and canals are dark cores visible within the bright filaments that extend into the sunspot, representing previously unknown and unexplored solar phenomena. The filaments' newly revealed dark cores are seen to be thousands of kilometers long but only about 100 kilometers wide. Resolving features 100 kilometers wide or less is a milestone in solar astronomy and has been achieved here using sophisticated adaptive optics, digital image stacking, and processing techniques to counter the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere.

But for their first year, Google has been changing its home page logo every Mother's Day in a tribute to mothers everywhere. And although the images for the years 2000 and 2001 don't look very different, take a closer look (images below) and you'll find a small but interesting distinction. We took this year's image from Google Australia, but you should see it on all of Google's sites.

Google is serious about scanning books. Throughout the objections raised over the years by authors and publishers and the more recent delays in its settlement with the Authors Guild, Google has been scanning millions of books all along trying to digitize as many as it possibly can. It is so serious about capturing and indexing the knowledge stored in books that it has a patent, which was issued on March 24, 2009, on how to scan books faster than was previously possible.