In Pictures: The 31 weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2012

Researchers with the Sandia National Laboratory in October tied together 300,000 virtual Android-based devices in an effort to study the security and reliability of large smartphone networks. The Android project, dubbed MegaDroid, is carefully insulated from other networks at the Labs and the outside world, but can be built up into a realistic computing environment, the researchers stated. That environment might include a full domain name service (DNS), an Internet relay chat (IRC) server, a web server and multiple subnets, said John Floren a computer scientist with the project.