A subway platform stands deserted at Columbus Circle on Sunday, Oct. 28, 2012. (Peter Foley - BLOOMBERG)

Our mobile devices give us a remarkable ability: to document every moment our lives. But in our relentless attempt to curate all of these experiences for others using a variety of filters, are we missing perhaps the most important filter of all — a “moral” one?

The NASA logo is seen on the outside of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012. (Andrew Harrer - BLOOMBERG) Two years ago, President Obama told a crowd of more than 200 people assembled in Cape Canaveral, Fla., that a manned mission to an asteroid by 2025 would be among one of NASA’s goals. But a scathing report released Wednesday shows that, among other issues within the agency, NASA’s not really doing much in the way of making it so.

The National Research Council report — commissioned by NASA at the behest of Congress — finds that “there has been little effort to initiate” the asteroid mission. The report also found the agency’s overall mission and vision statements to be “generic” and that both statements could “apply to almost any government research and development (R&D) agency.”

In this July 10, 2011, file photo, Prince William and wife Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, are photographed by fans during a visit to the U.S. in Culver City, Calif. (Chris Pizzello - AP)

Thanks to the proliferation of social media platforms, Prince William’s and the Duchess of Cambridge’s first child will be the most tweeted-about, blogged-about and photographed royal baby in history. Then, thanks to the pervasiveness of the digital trail we leave behind as we make our way around the Web, this royal baby will grow up to be the first king or queen born into the Internet age.

Thomson Reuters’ intellectual property consulting arm released its second annual “top 100” list of global innovators Tuesday. The list relies heavily on patent data to determine who’s in and who’s out and uses four criteria: patent volume, the success rate in being granted a patent, the global reach of the patent portfolio, and the influence of patents based on citations. In order to qualify, an organization had to have 100 inventions between 2009 and 2011.

The AT&T Inc. logo is displayed at a retail store in Washington, D.C. on March 21, 2011. AT&T was among the companies that made Thomson Reuters top 100 list of innovative companies in 2012 but not 2011. (Andrew Harrer - BLOOMBERG) This year’s list, and the associated report, includes the oft-mentioned names in innovation, such as Samsung, Apple and Microsoft. Google, AT&T, Lockheed Martin and John Deere were listed this year, after not making last year’s list. Bayer, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Philips, Unilever, Yamaha and Airbus fell off the list.

Notable on the list were tech companies Apple and Samsung, which have made headlines for their intellectual property disputes.

“Patents are finally being recognized as a viable asset class with revenue-generating potential far exceeding other sources,” read the report, referring to the Apple-Samsung disputes as well as other large patent acquisition deals.

Asked whether the patent-related courtroom battles played a role in determining which companies made the list, David Brown, president of Thomson Reuters IP Solutions said they didn’t, “at least not directly.”

The semi-conductor industry was the most prominently featured sector, with 18 companies listed, followed by computer hardware, with 13 companies in that sector listed. Government agencies and academic institutions also made the list, with the two university recipients coming from South Korea: Pohang University of Science and Technology and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The United States is home to the two government agenices listed: the Departments of the Army and Navy.

Correction: An original version of this post reported that the rover had failed to find organics. However, the rover has found organic compounds, it has yet to be determined that they are of Martian origin .

Read the full report on the Mars rover’s findings from the Post’s Brian Vastag.

This Curiosity has completed full analysis of its first soil samples, the space agency announced Monday. The samples have been scooped, shaken and heated, passing through the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Minerology (CheMin) instruments.

"We have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater," said NASA’s Paul Mahaffy, the SAM principal investigator, via a release.