(Photo: TED Blog)

What does Genesis frontman and prog rock god Peter Gabriel see when he looks in your eyes? The light, the heat and also an interspecies Internet capable of allowing highly intelligent animals to communicate with humans. Naturally.

Mr. Gabriel spoke on stage at TED last week alongside cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss, MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vincent Cerf. After spending time gazing into the eyes of animals and composing a song with a bonobo, Mr. Gabriel decided to team up with the trio in order to spread the word about the need for an interspecies Internet.

"Perhaps the most amazing tool man has created is the Internet," Mr. Gabriel said. "What would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces—visual, audio—to allow us to communicate with the remarkable beings we share the planet with?"

The group believes that animals can be incorporated into the Internet of things, allowing species like dolphins, apes and elephants to connect and communicate using the web. "These other sentient species should be part of the network too," Mr. Cerf said.

We all probably should've seen this coming from Mr. Gabriel, who's spent his career writing songs like "Animal Magic" and "Shock the Monkey."

The Q was running and you know it. (Photo: flickr.com/anniemole)

The MTA has screwed you over once again: There's now a publicly available, easily searchable archive of all service alerts issued over the last four years. Your best excuse for tardiness is now gone. [New York Post]

“Theirs was the only [event] that got worse as the week went on.” Things aren't going so well for Microsoft's advertising business. [Ad Week]

Check it out: You can now search in attachments in your Gmail. [Google Operating System]

NBD, just a version of "Somebody That I Used to Know" composed entirely of computer noises. [Make]

The Internet of Things is making it easier for Swiss farmers to get their cows efficiently knocked up. [New York Times]

FEED ME, SEYMOUR. (Photo: flickr.com/articulate)

Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, soon your near-dead plants will be able to text you when they desperately need water. [Wall Street Journal]

American Airlines' pilots can now use iPads throughout the flight. You, a mere wretched passenger, are not so lucky. [The Next Web]

After a stroke left his mother unable to use a keyboard, this dude hacked a Kinect to help her access email, because he is a better son than you. [CNET]

Good news! Some of those pretty women friending you on Facebook might not be spammers. Bad news: They might work for the Taliban. [Wired]

Artist's rendering. (Image: Cornell University)

CornellNYC is starting to come together. Applications are now being accepted; the infant school has a home with Google until the Roosevelt Island campus is complete. Now the Cornell Daily Sun reports that the debut roster is growing, announcing one name who'll be doing splitting his time between Ithaca and New York and a semester-long visitor from San Diego.

That faculty lounge is starting to fill up! Provided the faculty lounge is actually David Karp's sidecar.

Joining UCLA poachee Deborah Estrin (for the first semester, anyway) will be a Cornell professor of electrical and computer engineering, Rajit Manohar, and a University of California at San Diego professor of computer science engineering, Serge Belongie.

UPDATED: An earlier version of this article suggested that Professors Manohar and Belongie were new, full-time hires. We've updated the relevant portions of the article to make their positions more clear. Betabeat regrets the error. 

Good news for all you Big Apple big data types: Professor Belongie will be teaching "Modern Analytics,"  which sounds like it'll help make the campus fertile ground for hunting new talent. According to the Sun: "His class arose in response to the growing number of high tech companies looking to hire data scientists."

Professor Belongie's comments to the Sun make us wonder--not for the first time--how closely tied the final product will be to the commercial world:

“I felt that had Stanford won, in some sense it would suggest that Stanford would be bringing some of the Silicon Valley-style approach to New York, because that’s where Stanford has excelled traditionally; they’re such an integral part of the culture in Silicon Valley,” Belongie said. “The idea that a different university won, one that’s actually from New York State, presents a really neat opportunity to create something brand new instead of a copy of something that exists somewhere else.”

His point is well taken, but one wonders whether he's ever heard the expression, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Professor Manohar, on the other hand--who's agreed to an intense-sounding half time in New York and half time in Ithaca--will be teaching something a little more hands-on IRL. In "Physical Computing," students will learn to build tech that interacts with the environment. Think smart grids and smart homes. Maybe that manufacturing revival isn't just a product of our fevered imagination, after all.