Graphene may brighten the future more literally than we had originally anticipated, besides merely revolutionizing electronics and Silicon Valley. Swedish and American researchers have transformed the one-atom-thick carbon material into a new, inexpensive lighting component that could give organic light diodes (OLEDs) a run for their money.

Attention recruits. Those of you landing in Afghanistan in coming months may not have to engage in the sandbag stacking and trench digging usually associated with lowly grunt-dom. An $800,000 investment in an armored wall system known as McCurdy’s Armor could have Marines rapidly erecting 6.5-foot-tall mortar-, RPG- and bullet proof fortresses in less than an hour, saving the days it can take to fortify an area by conventional means and making forward-operating units more nimble.

Looking for open parking spaces in the city is one of the more teeth-grinding rituals for drivers, but researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey may have hit upon a relatively low-cost solution. They combined ultrasonic sensors with GPS to create digital maps of available parking spaces for Web-based navigation systems, according to Technology Review.

The body is a resilient biological structure, but there's one thing medical science, an increasing number of Baby Boomers, and the majority of professional athletes will all tell you: Take care of your joints, because once you burn up the cartilage you started with, you're not getting any more. But a breakthrough by Northwestern University scientists will now allow adult joints to naturally grow new cartilage for the very first time.

Australian scientists have announced a major new finding that helps explain how natural systems like coral reefs and forests maintain the richness of their mix of species. Their findings have important implications for understanding how humans can better protect biodiversity during one of the worst episodes of species extinction in the Earth’s history. The research also may help to explain why, in habitats fragmented by human activity, the loss of species can be especially high – despite our best attempts at conservation.

The 50th anniversary of Australia’s relationship with NASA approaches, but the standard Space Vehicle Tracking and Communications agreement, renewed every 10 years since 1960, will not be renewed. Instead, when the agreement expires on February 26, it will only be extended for two years.

An interesting report from CNN over the weekend: a tabletop hydrogen fuel cell recharging station could bring hydrogen power to the individual home, allowing portable devices and eventually automobiles to charge up on the universe's most abundant element cleanly from the comfort of home.

Google's vision for a better world involves removing those pesky language barriers that keep people apart, and so the Internet search giant has begun development on a voice recognition and automatic translation system for cell phones. Such technology could either herald a new era of fruitful international collaboration or usher in new grievances and conflicts, depending on your viewpoint.

Wireless TV just got a whole new meaning. Sony has just announced a new short-range, intra-gadget technology that clocks a 11Gbps transfer speed. The tech, known as millimeter-wave, allows electronics innards to communicate wirelessly with one another, which could allow for slimmer designs and fewer wires--that means fewer connections to sever, and potentially more reliable gadgets.

A 2007 hacker attack on an Internet café in Hubei Province in China has led to the discovery and dismantling of an online hacker training camp accused of providing malicious software and lessons in hacker technique to tens of thousands of Chinese users.

Humanity's search for the secrets to immortality has inspired Ray Kurzweil's Singularity vision and DARPA's hunt for ageless synthetic beings. Now scientists have discovered a single gene that appears to control how quickly individuals will biologically age, The Telegraph reports. The discovery could not only encourage people to adopt healthier lifestyles earlier, but may eventually help people live longer if scientists can figure out how to manipulate the gene.

It wasn't that long ago that the T1i first brought 1080p video to an entry-level digital SLR--albeit at a pokey 20 frames per second. Today, Canon's latest digital Rebel, the T2i borrows the video capabilities of the far more advanced 7D in a sub-$1,000 package.

CSIRO scientist Dr Tara Sutherland and her team have achieved an important milestone in the international quest to artificially produce insect silk. They have hand-drawn fine threads of honeybee silk from a ‘soup’ of silk proteins that they had produced transgenically. These threads were as strong as threads drawn from the honeybee silk gland, a significant step towards development of coiled coil silk biomaterials.

The harder you hit something, the bigger the impact, right? That is probably what’s going through your mind as you tee off on a golf course, peering down the fairway at the white pole that marks your little ball’s destination: You’re going to have to hit that ball pretty hard. And hitting it hard means swinging as fast as possible, doesn’t it? Well, it turns out that a faster golf swing does not actually equate to greater ball distance.

Silicon Valley may want to update its name, because IBM has created graphene transistors that blow away the silicon competition. The transistor prototypes were made from sheets of carbon just one atom thick that could switch on and off at 100 billion times per second. The 100-gigahertz speed is about 10 times faster than any silicon equivalents, Technology Review reports.