Dolphin Browser for mobile devices received a voice-control feature on Wednesday for Android users, allowing them to search the Web with just their voices.

The new feature — called Dolphin Sonar — allows you to open new tabs by speaking to the browser, and it can even search within sites. For example, saying “Facebook Justin Bieber” will display his Facebook profile.

The speech recognition feature is available for free in the Android Market via the Dolphin for Android version 7.4 update. The update also includes an improvement in browser speeds.

Scott Henderson is managing director of CauseShift, writes about social impact for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and is founder of NewEmpireBuilders.com, a media collaborative covering the startups, non-profits and companies making the world better.

Startups have become the darling children of the world, it seems. Aspiring Mark Zuckerbergs, Caterina Fakes and Jack Dorseys are eager to launch the next big thing.

This rising entrepreneurial tide is having an impact on all sectors. The latest generation to enter the work force arrives at a time of high unemployment. Its members see large problems that need to be fixed, and often, they have little faith in incumbent institutions’ ability to solve them. In an attempt to change the world, these aspiring entrepreneurs are choosing to launch new ventures, for profit and non-profit, that embrace transparency, agility and innovation.

China’s notorious firewall was down temporarily this week, allowing the Chinese to access Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sites usually blocked by the country’s strict Internet controls.

The cause of the breach is currently unknown, Reuters reports. Internet users say the were able to access sites — without using expensive VPNs, as some do — Monday night and Tuesday. By Wednesday, however, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were again blocked.

During the firewall’s outage, many Chinese flocked to Google+, particularly to U.S. President Barack Obama’s page. They left many comments calling for freedom of expression, such as “the Chinese GOV doesn’t represent the Chinese people.”

Social media is changing the way we eat. Many of us are giving up around-the-table dinners to dine with their computers or phones.

A new study called “Clicks and Cravings” examines this trend — and suggests it’s not a bad thing.

More than 29% of social media users are on a social networking website while eating or drinking at home. Outside the house, the figure is 19%. About 32% of us text or socialize on a mobile device at meal time. Not surprisingly, the youngest demographic in the survey — 18-34 year olds — tweet, Facebook and text during mealtimes at a higher rate of 47%.

Foursquare is parting ways with Google Maps in favor of crowdsourced maps created by the OpenStreetMap project.

Foursquare announced the change in a blog post Wednesday, explaining its decision to make the big API switch. To power the new maps, Foursquare is partnering with MapBox, a startup which calls itself “a beautiful alternative to Google Maps” and uses data from OpenStreetMap.

“As a startup, we also often think about how we can make life easier for other startups,” the Foursquare blog explains.

What is it about small, repetitive moving images that everyone is so crazy about on Tumblr? Animated GIFs have been circling the web since 1987, yet in the past few years, they seem to have increased in popularity.

Because Tumblr acts as a digital incubator for all things visually stunning, it has helped rejuvenate the outdated artform — along with other content-curating sites like Reddit. The GIF tag on Tumblr is thriving with animated images of anything from cats eating pizza, to more captive, cinematic city shots.

SEE ALSO: 10 Hilarious Animated GIFs that Took the Web by Storm

A team of Japanese scientists were able to draw important conclusions about our Solar System from looking at specks of dust retrieved from one asteroid.

The results from the Feb. 27 study of the asteroid Itokawa were published in the latest edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The conclusion: space is brutal.

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa was launched into space in 2003 to collect samples from Itokawa, a near-Earth asteroid. It collected five tiny grains, much less than one millionth of a meter in size. The mission returned in 2010.

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The machines have won – at least when it comes to being able to play music better than a Mashable editor.

While that might not be saying much in my case, the music video that debuted at the TED conference on Wednesday showing flying, autonomous robots playing a coordinated version of the James Bond theme song was by any account an impressive technological achievement.

The video was the culmination of a presentation by The University of Pennsylvania’s Deputy Dean for Education Vijay Kumar, who showed off recent advances in robotics and gave the audience a primer in how they work.

Google’s new privacy policy takes effect Thursday. What’s new about it?

Now, it allows Google to integrate information it collects about you from all your Google accounts. So instead of treating your YouTube, Gmail and Google+ accounts as separate entities, Google now sees you as just one user. That should make it easier to target you with relevant ads.

But since Google first announced the change in a blog post on Jan. 24, the holistic approach has some made some people leery of the new privacy policy. France’s official data-protection agency has even launched an investigation to see whether the changes conflict with European privacy law.

Facebook rolled out Timeline for brand Pages today, and Mashable is proud to update ours on day one.

We’ve closely chronicled reactions to the switch to Timeline from personal profiles in recent weeks. While many are disappointed with Facebook’s new look, the change to Timeline has been eye-opening and emotional for others.

We must admit, our experience lines up with the latter.