A new report from business weekly Barron’s ( via Reuters ) claimed The Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index could potentially replace stocks from Alcoa, Bank of America, or Hewlett-Packard with Apple or Google. There’s no exact timeframe for the overhaul of the Dow index, but Barron’s said Apple would have to split its shares to guarantee a spot.

Marking the first significant piece of data to help build a picture of Apple's quarterly iPhone sales numbers ahead of next week's earnings release, Verizon today announced its own earnings results for the first quarter of 2012, revealing during the associated conference call that it activated 3.2 million iPhones during the quarter. The number is down from 4.3 million iPhones in the previous quarter, which was part of Apple's record-setting launch quarter for the iPhone 4S that saw the company sell 37 million iPhones worldwide. Analysts are generally expecting Apple's iPhone sales for the first calendar quarter of 2012 to be down slightly from that 37 million number, and Verizon's results certainly support that belief, at least in the United States

Math is one of those disciplines that has a long and colorful history. If you want to learn more about the great math minds of the past, you should download Minds of Modern Mathematics from IBM

IBM's always been looking out for the best interests of humanity, even when its robots school us at Jeopardy . A patent granted to IBM just a few weeks ago outlines a system they're working on for tying financial incentives in with healthy habits, such that eating well and getting exercise might actually pay off with real money .