The U.S. Department of Education announced the winners of this year's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract awards. The SBIR funds are earmarked for small businesses using "cutting-edge R&D" to develop technologies to solve tough problems. Half of those contracts are game-related in some way - either they are for games or use gaming technology in a creative way.

Facebook has blocked an app that lets users play a game of "Russian Roulette" with their Facebook account. The social suicide game was a little too over the top for Facebook, apparently. Like the real-world game involving a gun with one bullet in it, the app gives participants a one-in-six chance of deleting their Facebook account. Social Roulette was brought to the attention of Facebook by an automated system that deals with "negative user experience."

Select Twitch.tv content is now available via Xbox 360 thanks to the release of a new app. While Xbox Live Gold members won't be able to use the service to broadcast their gameplay exploits with the new app, they will be able to watch content from the top 300 live Twitch channels. For now the app is only available to Xbox Live Gold members in the United States.

An interesting story in the New York Times (as unearthed by Develop) reveals that a hedge fund manager that controls billions in investment in Sony has suggested that the company break up parts of the company.

The Entertainment Consumer Association (ECA) and the AbleGamers Foundation have teamed up to open a special chapter of the organization dedicated to consumers called the AbleGamers Game Accessibility Chapter. The AbleGamers Foundation runs AbleGamers.com, which provides news and reviews on the accessibility of mainstream video game titles, and covers assistive technology. The ECA is the non-profit membership-driven organization that represents consumers of various forms of entertainment in the US and Canada.

The U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. has sided with Nintendo in a patent lawsuit filed by Motiva LLC in 2008 alleging that the Wii console infringed on technology that facilitated "a system to track player position and movement." In its ruling the court gave the plaintiff a scathing rebuke while rejecting its appeal, noting that litigation was "Motiva's only activity that could be related to commercializing the technology."

A note to investors from financial analyst firm Cowen and Company predicts that NPD numbers will show a double digit decline in retails sales until the next Madden game hits store shelves, and that April will see a shortfall of 13 percent compared to last year.