Alright, so the Iron Man-shaped hero in Robo Nativity is totally not licensed. I was unsure if he was supposed to be more like Mega Man until a helpful prompt informed me that for a minimal fee I could also play as War Machine. So, you’re definitely playing as Iron Man in this curiously named platformer-meets-endless runner.

You start off running along the ground beneath various platforms. Enemies and obstacles require you to jump and fire as you collect as many gold coins as you can. As far as this being a nativity, you won’t encounter any babes in mangers, but the Mandarin-like baddies this not-Iron Man shoots do look a bit like wise men. So, don’t look for any new religions in Robo Nativity, unless you are way into the idea that Tony Stark is the messiah (I kinda am).

Musical video sharing app Mindie has received a significant new update.

Similar to (non-musical app) Vine, Mindie lets users select a backing track, and then record and share a looping music video of up to 7 seconds.

MarginNotes is an interesting app that may just be a little too confusing to use, or may be the perfect document markup app ever. I still can’t figure out which.

The app will open EPUB and PDF files and let you mark them up, adding comments, margin notes, sketches and anything else, and also lets you add entire outlines, or turn the document into an outline – I’m not quote sure. Let’s take a quick look:

Successor to Steve Jobs, BFF of Steve Wozniak, and all-around “creative genius” Kanye West had some harsh words for Tim Cook over the weekend.

Speaking/singing on stage at a Saturday night show in Newark, NJ, West blasted the Apple CEO for allegedly asking him to perform for free at an Apple event.

We’ve been hearing tell that Microsoft will release a version of Office for iPad “soon” since at least February 2012, but instead of a native version, the only thing Microsoft has released so far is Office 365, a cloud-based version of the Office suite that works on mobile devices.

According to some well-connected insiders, though, the wait is almost over, and Microsoft could launch Microsoft Office for iPad in the next three months.

This week in Cult of Mac Magazine: Can iMacs find a cure for cancer?

Right now, thousands of kids across Kentucky are furthering cancer research while they do their schoolwork, thanks to the DataseamGrid.

Cult of Mac publisher Leander Kahney delves into how this massive grid of educational iMacs are churning data to help find a cure for cancer. One starter fact to make you blink: Every week, the grid processes 300 man-years worth of calculations while kids learn about fractions and foreign languages. Brian Gupton, Dataseam’s co-founder and executive director, talked to Cult of Mac about how this game-changing research is proving rich ground for education, employment and research.

Reporter Buster Heine checks out iPhone apps that can harness the processing power of your device while your run or walk your dog — he has found a bunch of great two-fer apps to get you in shape as you do good. We also bring you the best in new books, music and movies from iTunes and what’s worthwhile in the app store, plus our resident Apple genius dishes on whether the grass is greener, workwise, outside the store.

Cult of Mac Magazine

Chalk it up to the state of modern life if you want — where we’re much more comfortable looking at an iPhone screen than building fires and hunting wild animals — but there’s something undeniably manly about the idea of cleaning your iMac with something called a Screen Cleaning Blade.

Okay, so things get less rugged individualist when you hear that this is a scented, anti-bacterial Screen Cleaning Blade, and still less so when you hear that it features a “vibrant satin finish” — but, hey, at least it’s something, right? Coming packaged with another cleaner designed for your keyboard (the Keyboard Blade?), these two handy gadgets promise to keep your Apple products looking as shiny as the day you first unboxed them.

So do they live up to their word?

A few years ago at a MacWorld party, I spotted a guy I knew and barged in while he was talking to someone else. “Have you got a story for me?” I asked. He came back with a few suggestions, each less newsworthy than the last. His former conversation partner stood by in silence. Then Mr. no-news said, “Wait a minute: this guy runs the largest Mac supercomputer in the world!”

That guy was Brian Gupton, one of the brains behind the DataseamGrid in Kentucky featured in this week’s magazine. We talked for a couple of hours, lost in conversation in the middle of a party. I liked him immediately on a personal level: here’s a guy from a blue-collar background who is hugely passionate about education. And it turned out he had built this gigantic supercomputer that was trawling through massive amounts of data in the search for a cancer cure.

There were so many strands to the story.

At the time we met, there were two promising cancer drugs in the works. One of them appeared to be almost 100 percent effective at eradicating stage IV carcinomas. I remember being completely flabbergasted: “Are you sure no one has written about this?” His answer was even more astonishing: only local press had picked up the story.

I was amazed that he’d managed to build a world-class research tool in a place that was being decimated by the declining coal industry. It was a public/private partnership, and an early example of utility computing – this was before cloud computing had taken off.  Another fascinating detail: some of the drugs they were exploring were being grown in genetically modified tobacco plants.

Gupton and his partners built the supercomputer with Apple’s Xgrid, a software package for distributed computing  which, at the time, came built into OS X.  This meant that anybody could build their own supercomputer. And it meant that universities, schools, research centers could potentially become these powerful grids, following in Dataseam’s footsteps. (Apple has since removed Xgrid from Snow Leopard, making that less possible.) Many school districts buy iPads for kids now, favoring one-on-one computing without desktops. Yet Gupton is as passionate as ever and the researchers are still bullish, saying it’s the largest cancer drug pipeline in the country.

Today, the Grid hums as researchers look for chemicals to disrupt or inhibit the growth of cancer. Based on the modeling techniques that won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry they’ve built a simulator that takes a 3D model of a cancer protein and matches it against a molecular model of a chemical, working with a library of 20 million chemicals.

This supercomputer on a shoestring is still going strong.

There are lots of apps and open source efforts that put your unused Mac processing power to good use, but now that we’re shifting away from desktops and onto iPads and iPhones we wanted to know if all that tapping on a touchscreen can change the world.

The countless hours you’ve invested into Flappy Bird won’t get you much more than a shiny platinum medal, but here are five iOS apps that are fun to play and help you do some good in the world in the process.

Play To Cure: Genes In Space

Computer processing power is providing tons of heavy lifting for cancer research, but there are still some tasks computers don’t perform as well as humans, like recognizing visual patterns.

As part of the search for a cure to cancer, scientists across the planet are painstakingly analyzing thousands of cancer samples for genetic faults, but in a clever move to help speed up the work, Cancer Research UK has developed a game that lets gamers help.

In Play to Cure: Genes in Space players pilot a spaceship through the galaxy to harvest Dubbed Element Alpha, a newly discovered substance refined for use in medicine, engineering, construction and everything else. The thrill of blasting asteroids while scrambling through hoops at speeds faster than the speed of light provide players with hours of entertainment, but groups of gamers provide scientists with quick analysis of a cancer data set that would otherwise take hours with only one set of eyes.

Plotting points of density on the data set to steer your spaceship towards Element Alpha gives scientists more accurate results, which could be crucial in moving us toward the day all cancers are cured.

iTunes – Free

Quingo

Quingo combines trivia with aspects of bingo in a free-to-play game where are portion of the money raised from in-app purchases goes to benefit charities of your choice. The game spits out trivia questions with multiple answers on the board. The combination of quizzing and bingo is where it gets its awkward name, but the gameplay is actually pretty cool and challenging.

iTunes – Free
Sidekick Cycle

In a slightly meta move, developer Global Gaming Initiative’s Sidekick Cycle, a downhill-racing bicycle title, is using the money it raises to give children in Africa the opportunity to hurtle dangerously down steep hills on bikes of their own.

Alright, they probably prefer that the kids don’t do that, but it is certainly an option available to them.

The charity is dedicating half of its sales to the project, and it costs about $134 to build and deliver a single bike. This means that at its current price, the app generates one bicycle per 209 downloads.

iTunes – $1.99

Budge

We all make silly 5 buck bets with friends that they will/or won’t be able to do something, but rather than cycling your petty change through you and your friends’ pockets, Budge lets you put those bets to good use.

The app links to your Facebook friends so you can make bets of $10, $5, or $1 where the loser donates to their charity of choice. You can also make make bets public so others can compete in your challenge.

iTunes – Free

Charity Miles 

OMG bikini season is almost here, which means if you’re anything like me you’re pounding out 10 to 15 miles a week to get toned and in shape for that perfect summer bod. Well, maybe it won’t be the perfect bod, but you can put all your movement to good use too.

Charity Miles allows you to earn money for the charity of your choice by walking or biking out miles. On a short 30- minute walk with my dog I raked in $0.43, but you can also bike and earn 10 cents a mile, otherwise you get 25 cents when walking or running.

They just came out with an update that added teams so you can join forces with your friends to bike-away autism. If you’d like to join our team, just type in @cultofmac in the My Teams section.

iTunes – Free

We have no shortage of endless running/flying/floating/swimming games in the App Store. And here’s another one.

Avoid: Sensory Overload is a techno-skinned endless game in which you guide a ship through a perpetual series of obstacles and traps. All the while, the thumping music and neon-infused background light show do their very best to distract you.

It’s flashy, annoying, challenging, and ultimately a lot of fun.