When a monster storm roars out of the Caribbean as Hurricane Sandy has, lives and billions of dollars can hang in the balance. So what technology is in the pipeline to help us react quicker? And what about predicting the big storms? Weather scientists are working on new “scavenger” satellites. The satellites, which are reportedly only the size of four loaves of bread, will harvest reflections coming from the radio waves already bombarding earth from the legions of existing satellites in orbit, in order to look inside hurricanes for the first time.

This weekend marks the opening of the much anticipated sci-fi film Cloud Atlas, and a lot of people are planning on seeing it. Many have already watched a good chunk though — seven minutes worth. Not through illegal downloads, mind you, but with the help of a giant trailer released online by the film’s studio. It’s part of a growing strategy in the movie making business: use every technology possible to hype a film.

In a given day, you probably spend more hours gazing at Microsoft than you do your lover. Think about it: Microsoft controls the desktop of more than 80 percent of computers, and many of us have grown accustomed to that face. So when Microsoft proposes to radically change things, as is the case with Windows 8, it is time to pay attention.

Do you need Apple’s new iPad Mini, a shrunken version of the iPad? No you don’t need it. What you need is love, fulfillment, security and good health. So the question should be, will you want the iPad’s smaller sibling? Apple stresses that the smaller screen is still the same shape as the bigger iPad. This means apps for the regular iPad will fit fine. Plus Apple claims web pages fit better on its screens than they do on rival tablets which look a little squeezed by comparison. What the Mini iPad does squeeze is your wallet.  They want $329 for the base model. That price tag is at the tippy-top of predictions.

The fact that hackers are lurking is no surprise, but what about news that 185 million users might be vulnerable to thieves who want to steal your data? They won’t divulge which ones, but European researchers say some apps on Android smartphones leave passwords, bank accounts, credit cards, and other sensitive info vulnerable to theft. Eight percent of apps downloaded by the researchers from the official Google Play store were found to have security flaws.

Boy, could we make a lot of money if we knew who was going win the election in two weeks. All this technology, all of this fearsome data crunching power, you’d think our predictions would be getting better. Nate Silver, who runs the New York Times political blog Five Thirty Eight, says that all the new technology we have at our fingertips doesn’t guarentee better predictions. Turns out our computers often help us make bad political predictions more quickly. 

Twitter flipped a switch this week and bam: Users in Germany could no longer see the tweets of a banned neo-Nazi group. German cops wrote Twitter trying to get the account shut off completely; Instead the company confined the blackout to Germany. How did they do that? The microblogging social network had already engineered its own system to block content country by country. 

Teacher’s fantasy: Press a button and your students suddenly have new textbooks in their hands. Amazon thinks it can do this using its Kindle electronic reader. The company has just unveiled something called Whispercast, a free wireless system that lets a teacher’s Kindle communicate with student tablets and new books materialize from the ether. Amazon hopes to use this to gain a foothold in the education market where Apple has a head start. Unlike the free-for-all that is the internet, Whispercast is about control.

Internet search engines are tapping into the brains of your friends — well, more or less. You’ll soon be hearing a lot about what’s called “social search.” For instance when you do a Google search, hits from your Gmail show up in the results. Google is now expanding that system. Over at rival Bing, the Microsoft search engine, they’re doing something more interesting. Do a search for info about, say, athlete’s foot and Bing will also check what friends on Facebook are saying about fungus infection. What are the good and bad implications here?