Page Not Found - Website Search

Our November edition is printed and ready for shipping to subscribers! Everyone else, you can get your hands on it:

On sale 26th October 2011

Let's take a look at what's inside...

At 9:16 p.m. local time--that was at 9:16 a.m. eastern time here in the U.S.--China successfully lofted its first inhabitable space station module into orbit on the back of a Long March 2F launch vehicle, marking a milestone for both the People's space program and for the Party's geopolitical ambitions. China--the third nation (behind the U.S.A. and Russia) to independently launch manned missions into space aboard homegrown technology--now joins the old Cold War powers as the third nation to put a space station into orbit.

A mournful French horn blows. An angsty Luke Skywalker stomps out of his aunt and uncle's sand hut and peers up at Tatooine's double sunset, his hair blowing in the breeze. It's a memorable scene from Star Wars-but now, a precedent for such a sky with two suns has been found in our universe.

When it gets too hot, weird things happen. Like de-shelled hermit crabs fighting massive parameciums for piles of 3D printed shells and/or synthetic diamonds. THIS IS THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME.

Researchers on two continents are reporting two big breakthroughs in quantum computing today - a quantum system built on the familiar von Neumann processor-memory architecture, and a working digital quantum simulator built on a quantum-computer platform. Although these developments are still constrained to the lab, they're yet another sign that a quantum leap in computing may be just around the corner.

Trawling the Web looking for that last minute costume idea today? Look no further. NASA engineer Mark Rober has a "relatively simple" (we're calling it relatively expensive) yet technologically elegant solution to your Halloween wardrobe woes. All you need is two iPad 2s, some fake blood, and a shirt that you no longer care for.

One of the fun things about astronomy is that we can only know so much through empirical observation, yet we can "know" so much more through enlightened, mathematical guesswork. Such is the nature of the most interesting new science paper I've come across on the Internet today. In it, Wesley Traub of CalTech crunches some Kepler data and makes a tantalising mathematical prediction: one-third of sun-like stars have at least one earth-like terrestrial planet orbiting in their habitable zones.

Scientists have tracked down another goldilocks planet 31 light-years from Earth, and according to astronomers it has some strong points in its favor when it comes to the possibility of harboring the ingredients for life. HD85512b orbits an orange dwarf in the constellation Vela, and it's just the right distance from the sun--and just the right mass--to rank among the most Earth-like planets ever discovered.

Nike just announced that it's bringing the famed self-tying, light-up sneakers from Back to the Future II to market as a limited edition, under the name Nike Air Mag. They're not tech-free, boasting some flashy LED lighting, but everyone knows the main draw of the movie's shoes was the self-tying--and these shoes could have been so much more futuristic. It may not be 2015, the year depicted in the movie, just yet, but that doesn't mean we don't deserve self-tying shoes right now, dammit. Here are some possible routes to the true self-tying shoe.

For all the amazing technology developed by and for American defense and intelligence agencies, the government's spooks are apparently lagging way behind in one key area: Smartphones. That means no mobile email or Angry Birds for the US spy corps. One NSA agent is trying to change that.

If this theory were true, we’d all be walking around with invisible beams of light shooting out our eyes. The Emission theory suggests that, rather than photons on different objects emitting light which in turn we perceive, our eyes in fact emit light into our field of vision. Think it sounds ridiculous? Well apparently not to some. Results from a study in 2002 found that 50 per cent of American college students thought that this was really how our eyes work. We’d like to manipulate the light from our eyes into laser beams.

A new thermostat designed by the brains behind the iPod promises to save money by learning your household habits, encouraging energy efficiency while looking snazzy on the wall. The Nest looks like a 21st century version of the circular Honeywell heat controls many people grew up with, and it promises a modern, simple solution for lowering utility bills.

Until companies start launching private spaceships, Russian-built space capsules will be the only way to get astronauts up to the International Space Station or other orbital outposts. If these images are accurate at all, Russian-built spacecraft might as well stay the only option. Doesn't this look cozy?

More than ten years after the fact, a scientist based at the Norwegian research institute SINTEF is proposing that a well-documented chemical reaction spelled the ultimate demise of the Twin Towers after the attacks of September 11, 2020. This isn't another conspiracy theory, nor is it proven fact. But Christian Simensen theorises that a mix of molten aluminium from the aircraft bodies mixed with water from the sprinkler systems could have catalysed secondary blasts that brought the World Trade Center towers to the ground.

Next time you take your temperature, maybe think twice about its accuracy. Despite what the mercury says, not all of your cells are really at 37 degrees celsius, scientists reported in a new study. Using nanoscale thermometers, researchers have shown for the first time that living cells can exist at different temperatures. Busy sections are warmer, and less-active ones are cooler.

This is Hurricane Katia, which formed in August this year, peaking as a Category Four hurricane and affecting parts of the US and Europe. Its fastest wind speed was 215 km/h. In this photo you can also see some shaping of a hurricane's characteristic spiral arms, technically called "spiral banding" or "rain banding" when not referring to hurricanes.

News from the field of HIV research has been pretty promising of late - this summer, we heard good news that antiretroviral treatment is superbly effective, at least when it's used correctly. And thanks to some video gamers, scientists' understanding of proteins involved in HIV keeps getting better. Now researchers have another tool in their arsenal. They can strip the virus itself of its ability to trick the human immune system.

NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) has finally returned home after two decades in orbit, and it couldn't have crash-landed in a better place: a 800-km-wide swath of the South Pacific. The falling 5.4-tonne satellite - which had been expected to re-enter the atmosphere for a couple of weeks, causing some degree of worry - plunged into a part of the world that is virtually uninhabited, mere minutes after reports said it might come crashing down in North America, NASA officials said yesterday.

We've seen single-molecule "motors" before, but they're pretty primitive, motors only in the most basic sense of the word. But this new one, made of a single butyl methyl sulfide molecule, is much closer to what images the word "motor" might conjure: when electricity is applied, the molecule is triggered to spin, without affecting any other molecules around it.

Last week, we told you about a New York Times analysis of the green jobs sector, painting a disappointingly dismal picture given all the hope surrounding economic growth via clean-energy technology. But now, a new piece from the watchdogs at Grist has taken strong issue with the Times's dreary conclusion.

If it's a space race the Russians want, a space race they shall have. But et tu, Europe? Russian news outlet Ria Novosti is reporting that the European Space Agency (ESA), long the ally of Cold War champion NASA, is teaming with Russia on a joint manned mission to Mars, and that their crew will be the first to set foot on the Red Planet.

When our planet was still forming, collisions with other planetesimals - and a Mars-sized object that sheared away the moon - turned the embryonic Earth into a roiling ball of molten rock. Iron and other heavy elements sank toward the core, and other iron-loving elements did, too. As a result, there's plenty of gold at our planet's center. So why, then, is there also gold in the hills? A new study supports the theory that it was all a gift from above.

Not content with just stirring the pot in particle physics, CERN has embarked on an experiment aimed at addressing whether or not comic rays from deep space might be seeding clouds in Earth's atmosphere, influencing climate change. The early findings are far from deciding the issue of whether climate change is man made or otherwise, but they have borne some interesting results. It turns out that cosmic rays could be influencing temperatures on Earth. Perhaps even more groundbreaking, it turns out they also might not. Welcome to climate science.

Last week, DARPA's HTV-2 (Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2) Falcon vehicle launched to near-orbital speeds aboard a Minotaur rocket before beginning what was designed to be a Mach 20 glide back to earth, demonstrating the kind of hypersonic capability needed to deliver a payload anywhere in the world in an hour. Then, a few minutes into its flight, HTV-2's data transmitters went silent and so did the DARPA news stream feeding us the play-by-play.

Guide dogs are great, but vision-impaired people sometimes need to find their own way through complex environments. Instead of checking for obstacles with a trademark white stick, inventor Steve Hoefer has another idea: Use wrist-mounted sonar.

Hoefer designed a haptic gauntlet with ultrasonic sensors mounted just over the knuckles. The Tacit, as it's called, is encased in a neoprene cuff and can sense objects from about two and a half centimetres all the way up to 3 metres.

With connectivity and smarter planning, intelligent cars promise to cut congestion, make roads safer and generally improve the whole experience of getting behind the wheel. But nobody said it was all altruistic.

You know you're in the future when people start talking about electronics that can rewire themselves on the fly. A team at Northwester University in the United States have developed a new nanomaterial that can move and redirect electrons through itself, which, while not quite allowing your phone to transform into a laptop at a moment's notice, still may open a door to adaptable electronics.

Here at PopSci, we're greatly looking forward to wearing our technology. There's been a lot of work done on this front, from fireproofing to power generation, and now we can add memory storage to the list of things fabric of the future will be able to do.

One of the hallmarks of living things is self-replication, the ability to make new copies of biological structures. Scientists have harnessed this ability in several ways, using DNA and viruses to organize materials for things like solar panels. But inducing artificial self-replication, which would enable new types of self-fabricating materials, has proven more difficult. Now researchers at New York University say they've taken a step in that direction, building a complex artificial system that can self-replicate.

Over at Danger Room, Noah Shachtman got a look at the US military's current and next-gen night-vision goggles (or, more accurately, "goggle," or "monogoggle," since they only cover one eye). Hardly anyone ever gets to look at these, so to actually be able to try them out is pretty amazing. The goggles live up to the hype: they pack incredibly sensitive thermal sensors (enough so that reflections and handprints both glow) as well as embedded LCDs that transmit all kinds of data.

BAE Systems's Adaptiv technology enables objects as big as tanks to completely vanish from view--when seen at night with an infrared sensor, admittedly, but that's still a major advantage. An Adaptiv-outfitted tank can change its thermal signature to look like anything from a big rock to a truck to nothing at all, fading into the background and becoming invisible.

The Ekpyrotic scenario provides an alternative to the widely accepted Big Bang theory. It suggests that, unlike the Big Bang that began from singularity, our universe is one of a pair of universe that collided. This means there's another universe out there. That's not too strange considering popular culture accepts the possibility of parallel universes. But if this theory is correct, our twin universe is right next to us in another dimension, separated by a distance less that the diameter of an atom.

Windows Phone 7.5, known as Mango, is a massive upgrade to the already impressive Windows Phone platform, including major additions like multitasking, fast app switching (along with threaded conversations, an idea taken from the deceased WebOS), a totally new browser, apps integrated into search, augmented reality, and way more. It's the biggest update since the platform's original release, and we're really looking forward to seeing the next wave of hardware that really takes advantage of it.

We all know that one of the biggest obstacles to electric car adoption is the long, often overnight recharge time. But Nissan claims that they've created a new charging system that'll fill up your car (Nissan would undoubtedly prefer to say "your Leaf") in only ten minutes--not much different than a regular trip to the Earth-killing pump.

NASA is going back to the moon, sending off a pair of spacecraft that will help scientists learn the origins of our closest companion by studying its interior and its gravitational field. But beyond new lunar science, the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, GRAIL, will also help cement NASA's legacy of lunar exploration in the public imagination.

Whether we're engrossed in an activity or the alarm clock simply fails to chime, we've all been in situations when we say we've lost track of time. But our brains have not really lost track at all. A specific group of cells in the brain's memory center is encoding for the passage of time, researchers report. These "time cells" are key to our perception of sequences of events.

Dual-core processors have been a computing mainstay for more than six years, allowing machines to handle two tasks at once without sacrificing speed in either. This year, dual-core chips have begun popping up in app-hungry phones. The next step: cameras. The Olympus PEN E-P3 is the first digital camera running on a dual-core chip, which lets it capture, retouch, and save shots nearly twice as fast as most competitors.

We love when live animals follow a robot's lead, from Robofish leading schools of real fish away from harm, to babies fooled into thinking a friendly robot is human. But studies have not yet shown how these robotic surrogates can affect animal development. Now a new study suggests they can have a positive effect - at least for a while.

A new type of acoustic cloak would allow soundwaves to travel around an object unimpeded, and could be used to build better concert halls, quiet spaces and noise-shielding headgear, researchers say.

Apple's iPhone 4S announcement yesterday was somewhat anticlimactic save the incorporation of Siri, a voice-command application that is now integrated deeply into Apple's new iOS 5 and allows users to ask their phones questions and give them commands in natural language. And if that kind of voice recognition and command sounds somewhat familiar to you technophiles, it should. Siri is the indirect spawn of DARPA, Danger Room reports, envisioned to help military commanders organise their data and otherwise make sense of fast-moving situations.

In the future, all your government mail - jury duty slips, election notices, those Social Security earnings statements - may not come in the mail at all. Here in Australia, federal politicians are debating ditching snail mail entirely, giving all citizens a state-sponsored inbox where we would receive all government communications.

The only mammals that can fly are also the only mammals with a larynx that flexes at ludicrous speed, a new study shows. As bats flip and whirl toward their prey, they chirp at an accelerating rate, increasing their echolocating calls to 160-190 chirps per second. This is possible because their laryngeal muscles can contract up to 200 times per second, researchers say.

Micro air vehicles, or MAVs, make for a tantalising option for intelligence and surveillance agencies looking to surreptitiously gather information or deliver surveillance devices without being seen. But MAVs--usually modeled after small birds or insects-- are notoriously unstable in flight and difficult to manoeuvre in cluttered environments. So the Pentagon is handing out research contracts to make the DoD's little robotic bugs more stable by making them more bug-like. Specifically, the DoD wants big bulging bug eyes and hairy wings for its MAVs.

Beijing officials are denying accusations the Chinese military interfered with two US Earth-monitoring satellites, the wires are reporting today. On Friday, a draft report to the US Congress said at least two satellites were tampered with four or more times in 2007 and 2008, and that the breaches were consistent with Chinese military strategy. Given that the Pentagon has said cyberattacks are akin to an opening salvo in a traditional military conflict, this sounds like very troubling news.

Researchers presenting at the 242nd National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society this week in Denver have demonstrated a new DNA test that can measure the amount of potential carcinogens clinging to a person's DNA. But unlike previous tests that required white blood cell or urine samples and fairly intensive lab scrutiny, this one can hunt for carcinogens in a simple saliva swab.

So far, the only thing moving faster than light is speculation. But in the wake of last week's baffling neutrino news out of CERN, physicists are crunching numbers to test whether these ghostly particles really can move faster than photons. Physicists at Fermilab are re-examining some old data to help answer the question.

If you're feeling lucky after NASA's UARS satellite fell safely from orbit into the middle of the Pacific--rather than into the middle of Sydney--let's hope your luck doesn't run out. The German Aerospace Center says the retired ROSAT satellite's orbit is rapidly decaying, and pieces of it could start falling from the sky as early as Friday and up until Monday. That should make for an exciting weekend.

Commanding an army of drones is one thing; letting drones command themselves is something else entirely, especially when they have very little in common. Boeing recently tested a swarm network to help disparate drones work together, sending two types of unmanned aerial vehicles on a reconnaissance mission over eastern Oregon.

The latest news from the Large Hadron Collider: scientists still cannot explain why we're all here. In the most detailed analysis of strange beauty particles - that's what they're really called - physicists cannot find supersymmetric particles, which are shadow partners for every known particle in the standard model of modern physics. This could mean that they don't exist, which would be very interesting news indeed.

A five tonne piece of space junk is hurtling out of control towards Earth and is expected to hit the ground sometime this weekend. NASA says that the defunct Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), which was launched in 1991 to study climate change, will make impact somewhere between 57° south latitude and 57° north latitude - basically the entire populated world.

A new heat-sensitive gel and glue combo is a major step forward for cardiovascular surgery, enabling blood vessels to be reconnected without puncturing them with a needle and thread. It represents the biggest change to vascular suturing in 100 years, according to Stanford University Medical Center researchers.

Pervasive, persistent optimism is one of those uniquely human traits/flaws - we tend to believe things are better than they really are, or that negative consequences won't befall us, even if they befall others. It stands to reason that people would adjust their expectations when confronted with harsh reality, yet they don't. Our brains are to blame, according to a new study - we're wired to have a positive outlook.

Today, in an almost insultingly brief statement in the middle of a press release about something else entirely, HP killed off its most recent acquisition, and perhaps its most beloved platform: WebOS, the mobile OS designed by the scrappy gurus at Palm. It's a bitter, inconsequential end for an OS that in its own way paved as much ground as the iPhone, and that even in its current decrepit state is a damn fine platform. WebOS, you deserved better.

The New York Times took a look at start-up Narrative Science today, a company that has developed what is a pretty cool step forward for artificial intelligence, and a pretty frightening step towards human labor's eventual replacement by machines, a piece of software that takes data (sports statistics, financial reports, etc.) and turns it into news articles. They're pretty confident about their product too, with one of the founders predicting that a computer program will win a Pulitzer within five years (and that it may well be their technology).

Scientists at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks have successfully caused a group of arctic ground squirrels, naturally hibernating animals, to wake from and then go back into hibernation. It's the first time anyone has ever managed to induce hibernation, and it could have some pretty amazing medical benefits for humans as well.

Researchers at Stanford University just published a study in Nature that may give new hope to those looking to stop the effects of aging on the brain. The study found that when blood from a young mouse was injected into an older mouse, that older mouse enjoyed what could almost be termed a "rejuvenation effect": it began producing more neurons, firing more activity across synapses, and even suffered less inflammation.

Using a webcam hooked up to custom PC software, a pair of researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, have created an augmented reality "mirror" that morphs your facial features at will.

Typing in Braille is tricky, requiring clunky and expensive dedicated devices--some costing as much as US$6,000--with limited functionality beyond their primary design purpose. But a team of researchers at Stanford University in California, including an undergrad on loan from New Mexico State University, have created a touchscreen interface that brings the ability to write in Braille to tablet PCs.

A couple of years ago we saw wireless technology that would allow us to see through walls. Now, the same team of researchers, from the University of Utah, is putting that motion detection technology to work monitoring breathing patterns. So not only can the network see through your bedroom wall, it can hear you breathing. Less sinisterly, the system could help doctors keep better track of patients with sleep apnea, surgery patients or babies at risk for sudden infant death syndrome.

Robert Bigelow is not a small name in the space world. His company Bigelow Aerospace is a pioneer of inflatable spacecraft, and the company has made waves with its plans for an inflatable, orbiting space hotel (not coincidentally, Bigelow's fortunes come from his ownership of the Budget Suites motel chain). So when he says something about the future of space travel, we listen. On the other hand, when he says that China is planning to take over the moon circa 2025, we listen, but with scepticism.

Stargazers and night-owls alike; this is your opportunity to look to the skies as part of an international amateur astronomy event. All you have to do is find a centaur shooting an arrow with a teapot.

Sitting back, chatting with your mates, watching the scenery pass you by - these pastimes are generally enjoyed by the passengers of a vehicle while the driver remains focused on bringing the carload to its destination. But a car designed by researchers from Berlin has successfully completed an 80 kilometre test run around the traffic-filled streets of Germany’s capital - without the driver lifting a finger.

A Soyuz rocket will lift off Friday from the northern coast of French Guiana, carrying two satellites that will formally kick off the European Space Agency's own version of GPS. It will be the first Soyuz ever to launch outside of the former Soviet Union, and its payload will free Europeans from relying on American navigation tech.

Tomorrow American high-energy physics centre Fermilab will power down their Tevatron particle collider for the final time, marking the end of an era. But for some, that era is so over anyhow. Hadrons, like last season's handbag, have had their time in the spotlight. The next hot trend in physics is muons, and all the cool kids know it. That's why Fermilab physicists are already taking a hard look at muon colliding technologies as a possible next move in the game of international physics research.

For now at least, the moon is like the sea: everyone can use it, but no one can own it. In 1967 the U.S. and the Soviet Union negotiated the Outer Space Treaty, which states that no nation can own a piece of the moon or an asteroid. "You have a right to go up and take the lunar soil, but you don't have any right to draw a square on the surface of the moon and say, 'That square is mine,' " says Stephen E. Doyle, a retired lawyer who served as NASA's Deputy Director of Internal Affairs. If the Space Settlement Institute-which lobbies for private industry to develop land on other planets-has its way, new laws will allow space colonists to stake moon claims and start a colony.

Windows announced earlier today that everyone will be getting mangoes. Or, maybe it's that everyone on the planet with an eligible Windows phone will be getting an OTA update to the latest Mango release, taking their Windows Phone OS to number 7.5. Both sound good - unless you're the holder of one of three capable handsets that don't fit the bill.

NASA is spending roughly US$175 million on three new technology demonstration projects, one of which is aiming to take HD data streaming to Mars. The Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) will explore reliable optical communications technologies that could boost data rates between Earth and deep space by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Scientists at CERN have run an experiment. A very simple time of flight experiment, measuring the time it takes a neutrino to get from A to B. The trick with this particular one is that this particle clocked in at a whole 60 nanoseconds faster than light. That small number is a big deal - if correct, it could overturn Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, the cornerstone of theoretical physics for the last century.

A little less than six months after the final space shuttle launch, a private space company will launch a rocket carrying a cargo capsule bound for the International Space Station. SpaceX said this week that it plans a Nov. 30 launch date for its first rendezvous with the ISS - an encounter that will mark a major milestone in private space exploration.

Imagine if Earth was being blasted by radiation so strong that it was disappearing at a rate of 5 million tonnes per second. Sounds pretty disastrous, right? 

Well spare a thought for poor old CoRoT-2b, whose companion star is bombarding it with x-rays a hundred thousand times more powerful than rays from our Sun, Science Daily reports.

An interesting gauge of a person's overall impact on our culture is now found immediately online, as the world learns together the news of that person's passing. By that measure, Steve Jobs has led a truly extraordinary life. But you didn't need us to tell you that.

We all know takeaway food sometimes requires special utensils to be eaten properly. The same is true for fish. (The food they're eating, not takeaway fish.) Below, behold the first video of a reef fish using a tool - and traveling a great distance to find it.

Let's face it, motorbikes are stylish. Big choppers even more so, in their loud, punk-rock kind of way. It's going to take some doing to get riders to even  think about trading in their gas guzzlers for a leaner, greener version. But perhaps the Detonator might give people some food for thought.

A new stretchy, supple synthetic skin prototype developed at Stanford has some impressive pressure sensitivity, deforming and contorting without any breakage or wrinkling. It's made of spray-on carbon nanotubes, which act as springs and can measure the force being applied to them.

Two Aussie scientists today pulled a couple of prizes from the annual IgNobel Prize awards, one for studying why some beetles mistake beer bottles for their mates, and another for looking into how much the need to urinate impacts our ability to think.

Bacteria swap genetic information as readily as people can share digital data - there are no cultural, political or systemic boundaries, according to a new study. Researchers say they have identified a massive gene network that facilitates the transfer of 10,000 unique genes among 2,235 bacterial genomes, across international borders and across species.

China may only have 30 percent of the rare earths in the world, but they essentially have a monopoly--which the rest of the world has been tirelessly trying to work around. (To wit: Japan looks to Vietnam, the U.S. looks to California and Missouri, everyone looks under the sea.) In a slightly devilish business move, China sought to tighten their grip and raise prices by eliminating all sales to its major buyers, the U.S., Japan, and Europe, for one month.

Scientists have discovered a link between Facebook friends and brain size, suggesting social networking could possibly change your brain - or that some people are just 'hard-wired' to make more friends.

New shoes with built-in GPS devices will go on sale this month to help track dementia patients who wander off and get lost. Caretakers can download a smartphone app that allows them to track the person wearing the shoes, which could help patients with Alzheimer's disease stay in their homes and live autonomously for longer periods.

From intestines to tracheas, tissue engineers are building a handful of new body parts - but progress on larger organs has been slow. This is mainly because tissues need nutrients to stay alive, and they need blood vessels to deliver those nutrients. It's difficult to build those vascular networks, but now a team from Germany may have a solution: Print some capillaries with a 3D printer.

Behold, your galactic centre. This Hubble image, captured with the space telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), is the highest-resolution pic of the Milky Way's galactic center taken to date, taking in a newly discovered group of massive stars, lots of super-hot gas, and roughly 35,000 square light years of space in one sweeping mosaic.

The offer came simply via the subject line of an email: "Want to fly a drone?" It was from Todd Backus of DATRON, a maker of--among other things--military grade radio communication systems and tactical data networking setups based in Vista, Calif. It was a question that didn't require a whole lot of consideration on my part--if there were drones to fly at AUVSI's massive unmanned systems show in Washington D.C. last week, I was going to fly them.

And that's how I end up on a soccer pitch far from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center piloting a small quadcopter drone and quietly praying that we won't be arrested. Not that we're up to anything criminal, but I have no idea how close or far we are from D.C.'s numerous "high-value" locations and the restricted airspace that surrounds them. What I do know is that if I'm jailed on suspicion of terrorism, my editors likely won't cover my expenses.

A defunct six tonne NASA satellite has crashed into Earth over the weekend, leaving a mystery as to where the space debris ended up. Last week we reported the satellite was headed for Earth after 20 years in orbit.

To work on the ISS is to be at the cutting edge of space exploration, to experience the rigours of space on a daily basis, and to test the changed conditions and their impact on the methods of science. So, naturally, they need the best we earth-dwellers can offer. And so it was that we decided to send them them two iPads and a stuffed Angry Bird doll. Godspeed.

Rarely does a week pass without some concern about space debris, whether it's falling to Earth or threatening the International Space Station. Plenty of private companies and government agencies have proposed solutions for this problem, from giant space nets to ground-based lasers that would push debris out of orbit. Here's one we have not seen before: A sticky robot arm that works like a mechanical tractor beam. It could be used to reach out and grab space debris of any shape or size - and for other purposes, like servicing the ISS.

A newly revamped $10 million prize for sequencing the genomes of 100 centenarians could yield the fastest-ever gene sequencing technology to date, finally bringing ultra-precise personal genetics to the masses on a rapid and inexpensive scale. And perhaps even better, the genomics X Prize could help unlock the genetic secrets - if they really exist - to a healthy, century-long life.

Brunico, Italy - A snowy K-Mart parking lot would have worked fine. But this being Ferrari, and the star its tradition-shredding FF - a $300,000 all-wheel-drive station wagon -- a little high-altitude showboating seemed in order. So with a boost from the Italian army's Chinook helicopters, Ferrari flew a pair of FF's to the windswept peak of Plan de Corones, a popular ski resort in its wondrous Dolomites, and told us to have at it. 

Ridiculous? Why, yes. But no more so than a 208-mph, 651-horsepower Italian pony that can carry four tall adults and cargo while galloping safely over snow, ice, dirt or puddles on the Pomona freeway.

It appears that phase 2 in what is quickly becoming something of a bona fide patent war has commenced, with Samsung seeking injunctions on the newly launched iPhone 4S, in Japan and right here in Australia, on the basis of a variety of patents held in Japan, and also right here in Australia.

Image: NASA / Name: Skylab / Reentry Date: July 11, 2020 / Reentry Location: South Western Australia / Size: 79 tonnes / Type: Uncontrolled reentry

The American space station's reentry was celebrated by media in the United States, with two competing San Francisco newspapers even offering rewards for parts or damaged property.

Social media can be problematic for professionals who don't want their bosses to see unflattering uni party photos. But it's even worse for people whose livelihood literally depends on anonymity, like undercover cops. What happens if the gang you've infiltrated finds your grinning mug in Facebook photos from the police union annual picnic?

75-year-old pensioner Peter Welton got quite a fright when a red-hot piece of space junk crashed through his roof in Hull, England. Welton donned his wife's favourite oven mits to carry the two kilogram, football sized object downstairs. The mass of metal could belong to anything - from a space shuttle to an abandoned satellite.

With the recent crash of NASA's UARS satellite, we thought we'd chronicle the re-entry of space junk over the years. 22,000 pieces of debris are currently being tracked in orbit by NASA, with millions more too small to detect. Hundreds return to Earth, usually undetected, each year. Here are just some of them.

We all remember Blinky, right? The lovable and very-slightly-mutated fishy from The Simpsons? Well, it turns out he actually exists, having been found by Argentinian fishermen in a Cordoba lake. Points to Groening and co for what is now surely to be acknowledged as incredibly insightful prophetic comedy.

Today in things that are just plain neat: a mashup of 3D printing and augmented reality that is helping molecular researchers test potential drug molecules in the lab. At the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., teams are making physical models of biological viruses and then testing them using an added layer of AR wizardry.

It's a recipe for disaster. Create a slightly flimsy looking multi-rotor flying apparatus, equipped with what appears to be an exercise ball as the central landing gear, and then place a person with a remote control pad on it. Ordinarily, you'd expect this to be the cue for screaming and yelling and maybe a missing limb or two. Thankfully, the German pilot emerged unscathed, with nought but a sense of satisfaction and a pretty cool looking show real.

Deep in the depths of the Dead Sea, new life has been discovered. Thanks to newly found freshwater springs, certain forms of bacteria thrive, bacteria that, unlike other known freshwater and saltwater bacteria, can cope with rapidly changing salinity. It's the intriguing results of the first study of the Dead Sea in years, a rare undertaking partly because "accidentally swallowing Dead Sea salt water would cause the larynx to inflate, resulting in immediate choking and suffocation."

We caught a preview of Sony's odd, space-agey head-mounted viewer (appealingly named the HMZ-T1) back at CES in January, but we were pretty surprised to learn that not only is it not a mere demo, Sony's actually planning on, like, putting the thing in stores, where you can exchange currency for it and then take it home. Sony claims it offers an incredibly immersive 3-D experience, better than any TV. We've now played with it twice, and in some ways, that's true.

Throwbot. Small, rugged, easy to deploy. "One time we dropped it out of a helicopter from more than 30 metres," one of the designers tells me. "The worst that happened was that one wheel was slightly damaged so it wanted to drive a little wobbly. But it still rolled."

In 1996, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple after a decade-long exile, the company's products took a dramatic turn. The next 15 years would be a whirlwind of monstrous success after monstrous success--iMac, iPod, iTunes Music Store, Intel-based MacBook, iPhone, MacBook Air, iPad. Jobs's resignation as CEO yesterday has led to some excessive hand-wringing about Apple's future, near and far, but the Jobsian philosophy--in which the consumer is king, in which there is one right way to do things, in which it is always preferable to trim than to add--will hopefully have permeated Apple enough to weather his departure. It's already had an effect on the world at large.

With hackers, DIYers and the military using them for years, domestic police forces the world over are apparently itching to get some surveillance drones of their own. Now, it seems the ACT Government has been discussing using drones alongside a new license plate recognition system, autonomously tracking vehicles of interest.

Today in somewhat creepy Japanese tech: a company called REAL-f is creating what it calls 3DPFs - that's 3D Photo Forms - of human faces that generate uncannily realistic replicas of faces in a kind of vinyl-resin. The result is either a mask-style replica or a full mannequin head that is accurate down to the blood vessels in the eyes.

Early every morning, before dawn if he can, Hashim Al-Hashimi goes running. Six miles, rain or shine, summer heat or bitter Michigan cold (Al-Hashimi works at the University of Michigan in the US). His chosen route is hilly for a reason. Just at the uphill crests-when the muscle pain is sharpest and the body most wants to quit-that's when his mind is sharpest. "Most of my thinking is at the top of a hill," he says.

I know, I know. But there's a possibility we could turn to nuclear power in the future. Plus, how could I resist showing such a cool picture! This is Australia's ANSTO facility which hosts the country's only nuclear reactor. The reactor doesn't produce power but is used for research. 

A new study into mammalian genomes has found and documented large amounts of what has been referred to as the 'dark matter' of genetics responsible in large part for the way that the functions of genes themselves are regulated.

Doctors whose bodies are regularly exposed to x-rays may be adapting at the cellular level to protect themselves against radiation, according to a new study. The research hints that humans could adapt to withstand radiation exposure.

The physicists who claimed to see neutrinos moving faster than light are moving quickly to replicate their experiment, hoping to substantiate their results before submitting them for publication. Since announcing their bizarre, seemingly impossible findings last month, physicists around the world have offered a few possible explanations. But perhaps the best test will be a retest.

Carmakers have spent the past few years aggressively downsizing engines throughout their lineups to meet increasingly tight fuel-economy regulations. But with the sole exception of the three-cylinder Smart Fortwo, four cylinders is as low as carmakers have expected Americans to go. Three-cylinders are common in Europe but have been scorned in the U.S., where they're tainted by association with claptrap cars like the mousy Geo Metro. Now, with fuel-economy standards set to rise as high as 90.4 kph by 2025, Ford is planning to bring the three-cylinder to the American mainstream.

Proving that there's always a different way to approach a problem, researchers at Los Alamos National Lab have devised a pretty clever method of algae harvesting that could take a major chunk out of the cost of algae-based biofuel production. And all they had to do was create a magnetic organism.

Wind isn't the only natural phenomenon that can be used as a means of energy production. There's also that big bright light in the sky. You're looking at Australia's very first solar power station in White Cliffs, NSW. When it first ran, each of those panels concentrated solar power to a specific point, which boiled water, which produced steam, which drove a steam engine, which intermittently powered a flickering 60 watt light bulb. Kidding. The set-up powered whole buildings until the station was converted to photovoltaic in 1996.

The American Department of Homeland Security is developing a system designed to apprehend people before they commit a crime. The Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST, is designed to analyse whether a person is likely to commit a crime, using a long list of factors. Some are akin to lie detection, such as breathing and heart rate, but the system also measures body movements, voice pitch changes, blink rate, breathing patterns, eye movements, body heat changes and prosody (changes in speech rhythm and intonation). The "prototype screening facility" is built to "detect cues indicative of mal-intent" using these algorithms. The system also analyses factors like ethnicity, gender, age and profession.

European researchers working at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France, have trapped the largest number of neutrons ever held in place at one time. But while they've smashed the previous record (also held by the ILL), it's still not quite enough, the lead researcher tells BBC. Still, the new approach that got researchers this far may be able to trap far greater numbers of neutrons with a little finessing.

Iran's ambitious 1960s-styled plans to send a live monkey into space aboard one of the Islamic Republic's Kavoshgar-5 rockets have been suspended indefinitely, a top space official told Iranian state television today, which pretty much dashes any hopes that we might see a primate hurled into suborbital space before year's end. 

Have a look at these photos taken from the International Space Station over the past few years. There's mountains, southern lights, tropical storms and spaceships. Do I need to sell it any more? All photos in this set were taken by astronauts aboard the ISS through the Crew Earth Observations program, aiming to serve as a record of our change and development on Earth. Everyone told you not to look down on yourself - but trust me, it's really quite interesting.

Organic light-emitting diodes, thin-film transistors, e-ink and other display technologies get plenty of ink — er, pixels — in these pages. But a non-traditional mechanical approach could be even more efficient, according to a researcher in Taiwan. Mechanical pixels, made of teeny micro-machines, would be visible in bright sunlight and can use far less power than familiar LCD screens.

NASA has awarded the single largest prize handed down in aviation history to Team Pipistrel-USA.com for designing and demonstrating its Taurus G4 electric aircraft. Per the rules of the NASA- and Google-sponsored CAFE Green Flight Challenge, Pipistrel's Taurus G4 covered 320 kilometres in less than 2 hours and did so on the electricity equivalent of less than one gallon of fuel per passenger, scoring US$1.35 million for the effort.

NASA has gone to great lengths to seed and cultivate the commercial space industry over the past few years, but it may want to be careful that it doesn't make the grass look too much greener on the commercial side. Mike Moses, NASA's deputy space shuttle program manager and former flight director--the guy who oversaw all shuttle operations over the last three years of the program--is jumping ship, heading over to Virgin Galactic to oversee operations at the space tourism front-runner.

Windows Phone, especially with its newest update, is a damn fine mobile operating system, but also one lacking a truly killer phone. We were holding out hope that Nokia's first Windows Phone smartphone would be the one to get, and it just might be--the Lumia 800 is the first Windows Phone that's as eye-catching as the OS inside. Nokia also announced the 800's little brother, the 710, which is no slouch either.

Piezoelectrics, a technology in which motion creates a small voltage, is one of our favorite up-and-coming areas of research, whether it's powering DARPA's beetle-bots or dampening bumps in the road. Now, Japan's Murata Manufacturing claims they have come up with a remote control that works by harnessing the piezoelectric power generated by, well, bending and twisting the remote itself.

The Russian Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft, carrying three astronauts (Commander Andrei Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyayev, both Russian, and American Ron Garan) safely landed this morning in Kazakhstan, bringing them home after five months on the International Space Station. The landing, about 151 km southeast of the smallish Kazakh city Zhezkazgan, wasn't entirely flawless--mission control lost contact with the capsule briefly--but the landing itself was very smooth.

Adventure-seekers can use all kinds of emergency beacon tech to help themselves get found in case they go missing - but in many cases, this requires sticking something in your pocket, from which it could conceivably fall out. A new antenna could instead be sewn right into your clothes, ensuring rescuers can find you so long as you're wearing something.

A pretty basic fear of the oncoming electric car boom is a concern that charging will be similar to the old cellphone-charger fiasco. Will the owner of a 2017 Mazda Thundersnake have to find particular Mazda charging stations, or will they be able to pull up behind a Chrysler EnFuego? Those fears can be allayed, mostly: seven major automakers have all agreed to adopt a single, universal charging system.

Digital recording binoculars aren't really new--there are some cheapie versions available--but Sony's new DEV-3 and DEV-5 binoculars lift that humble tech into some really impressive new places. Instead of taking a regular set of binoculars and cramming a cheap video recording device into them, Sony took its high-end HD camcorders and molded them into the shape of binoculars. That means they can both record in 720p (high-def) and in 3-D--these might be the perfect tools for birdwatchers and other nature-types (as opposed to snipers).

Nipping at the heels of yesterday's story about the software that automatically writes news articles comes another technological innovation changing the shape of journalism: software that reads news articles.

Kalev Leetaru of the University of Illinois determined that using the Nautilus SGI supercomputer to analyse news stories can help predict major world events. The analysis he used for the experiment was retrospective, feeding the computer millions of articles from which it was able to determine a deteriorating national sentiment towards Libya and Egypt before the revolutions in those countries. The system was also able to narrow down Osama Bin Laden's location to within about 200km before he was found and killed last May.

Wow. No doubt the worst pun made about this photograph ever. But it certainly would be cold on the Southern Patagonian Ice Field which is located in both Chile and Argentina. It has an area of almost 17,000 kilometres squared and there are actually two volcanoes under all that ice. It’s interesting to think about what changes we might see to this ice field if a similar photograph were taken in 50 years time. Drastic changes, or none at all?

That gigantic solar flare that lashed out toward Earth on Saturday is "the geomagnetic storm that just won't go away," the NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colo., said via its Facebook page today. And that appears to be true. Active Region 1302, pictured above, continues to pummel earth with solar energy and could disrupt satellite communications as it continues turning toward us in the days to come.

If you've ever wanted to take an in-the-air panoramic photo - say, in the middle of a bustling town square or out in the wild spaces of nature - but haven't had the equipment, your worries now are over, thanks to a nifty little ball embedded with a set of cameras, making it able to take 360 degree panoramas while in mid air. And there's not a button in sight.

This is an image of Clyde Hydro Power Station in New Zealand. The manipulation of water is another way in which we generate energy. Generally, hydroelectric power stations work by storing water in a dam and having it run through turbines to generate electricity. Once they're constructed, hydro power stations are very green, producing almost no waste and negligible carbon emissions. 

A new study has shown that the least energetic variety of ultraviolet radiation, UV type A, may be able to cause damage to deep tissue in humans, potentially leading to the development of malignant cancers.

A while back, John Carmack (of "Doom" and "Quake" fame, as well as the founder of Armadillo Aerospace) issued a challenge: launch a rocket to more than 100,000 feet (or a bit over 30km), get a GPS reading from up there, and recover the launch vehicle, and US$5,000 is yours. Some additional benefactors pushed the Carmack prize to roughly $10,000. And as you will see in this video, Derek Deville might just claim it.

NASA has completed the first round of testing on its Thermal Infrared Sensor (or TIRS), to fly out on the next Landsat satellite. Its mission is to map the Earth and keep track of all the water on it, and to do that it needs to be able to operate at super cold temperatures. And by that we mean almost absolute zero.

Microsoft's Research department is always coming up with cool new ways to interact with gadgets, and this newly released video of the "Holodesk" is definitely one of the cooler ones. It uses a Kinect ("hacked" doesn't seem really correct when it's a Microsoft project) to see your hands and face, and allows you to juggle completely virtual 3D objects--balance a virtual ball on a book, then tip it into a bowl of water, or stack virtual 3D blocks. It's pretty amazing.

The holy grail of prosthetics research is and has been a kind of "Luke Skywalker hand" interface--prosthetics that respond to stimulus from the brain and function just as the original appendage it is replacing. But ideally the prosthetic wouldn't just respond to stimulus from the brain--it would also provide sensory stimulus to the brain. It would have a sense of touch. And in a paper published today in Nature, we see the groundwork for just such a breed of prostheses.

We have a lot of love for microdrones here at PopSci--everything from bird-like flapping wing drones to cyborg insects controlled by microcomputers--so we're thrilled to see an air force is showing them some love as well. The US Air Force Research Lab has build a "Micro-Aviary" at Wright Patterson AFB in the state of Ohio where tiny flying robots will be the central focus. And aside from being drone-centric, it is one sweet sensor-filled laboratory.

Short of actually getting a ticket on a shuttle headed to space, this just might be the best view you're ever likely to get of our little corner of the universe.

The heart is a delicate instrument, relying on finely timed signals so it can pump blood in just the right fashion to keep you alive. When this process fails, artificial pacemakers, incorporating electrodes and microelectronics, have to step into the breach. As it turns out, scientists might just have arrived at a possible new alternative, and it's as simple as turning on a light.

Today we chat with the 63 thousand processing cores of the University of Texas's Ranger. That might be a bit of an obvious name for a Texan supercomputer, but the raw performance makes up for the lame attempt to be cool...

In Australia our energy comes from a range of different sources. When it's sunny, our solar panels soak up the rays and convert them into electricity. Weather turning bad? Gale whipping up? Not to worry, that chilling breeze isn't just giving us pneumonia - it's turning the blades of wind turbines across the nation. Just a little too chilly? Maybe the heat from that coal we're burning can keep us warm. And if all else fails, there's always the prospect of nuclear energy in the future.

Take the 3rd-generation Kindle, probably the best ebook reader ever made. Chop off the keyboard, trim the sides a bit, rearrange the buttons. Sell for eighty bucks. Correction: sell about a billion of these things for eighty bucks each.

While the country bumpkin farmer stereotype might suggest otherwise, driving a tractor is difficult, requiring precision skills. Now Flemish engineers have announced a new self-driving tractor with precision that rivals a human driver. This could mean drastically lower operating costs for farmers, and a step towards automated agriculture.

When it comes to practicality, geodesic domes are a contractor's worst nightmare. Where can you get windows that conform to hexagonal panels? Where should you install the pipes? Would a chimney look out of place? In spite of all these questions, we spent a good portion of the 1970s and '80s touting geodesic structures as the next big suburban fad.

We all knew it had to happen eventually, but few expected it this early: Skynet has arrived.

Only, instead of launching nukes, enslaving mankind, and more or less being a total pain, this version has a much more innocent purpose - to use the power of the crowd to keep an eye on space.

This image is of the India-Pakistan border, which can be seen as the brightest, darker yellow line which snakes horizontally across the picture. Below that line is Pakistan, and above it is India. The concentrations of light dotted across the Earth are particular capital cities including Lahore, Islamabad and New Delhi.

In the infancy of the telephone, discerning businessmen had not the time to deal with getting tangled in its cord, and innovators hadn't yet come up with the coiled cord solution. They came close, though, with this cord reel that keeps the cord wound up and out of the way without dragging the telephone off the desk.

Not because it could hurt the baby, of course. But your little bundle of joy could short-circuit the telephone cord and interrupt Mrs. Henderson from next door while she's in the middle of delivering the hot gossip. In the early 20th century, PopSci reports that phone operators got several calls from distraught mothers confused as to why their connection was so spotty after Junior's teething session.

Atom interferometers are neat little devices that exploit the wave characters of atoms to make highly precise measurements of things like distance or the force of gravity. But because they are fickle by nature--even the smallest vibrations distort their results--atom interferometers have been mostly limited to highly controlled experiments that take place in either underground labs or in free-falling zero-g experiments. But a team of French researchers has announced today the first use of an atom interferometer to measure the acceleration of an airplane.

Predicting the future of technology is often a shot in the dark. But every once in awhile, the complex evolution of tech gives us something that actually fulfills the starry-eyed dreams of years or decades before. And as we look back at the incredible achievements of Steve Jobs, you quickly see that, more than any other single innovator, he was responsible for so many of today's real-life consummations of past predictions.

This is an image of the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope, run by Sydney University and situated near Canberra. The telescope surveys the southern hemisphere and was key in creating a wide field radio image of the southern sky. The east - west arm of the telescope is 778 metres long. Impressive!

The brain is one of the most enigmatic and incredible organs in the human body, and so is unsurprisingly one of the hardest ones to explain. When you're trying to explain how it works towards kids, though, you have an even harder task ahead of you. Scientists recently tried their hand at making videos to help teach children about the brain in new and effective ways. And also by using rap music.

Couldn't resist putting this picture in - I think it's pretty cool. What you're seeing is a vision from inside the Anglo-Australian Telescope to the hardware itself. The telescope is 3.9 metres long and is optical. It was commissioned in 1974 and aimed to give vision of the southern skies at a time when most other telescopes were pointing the other way.

As we all know, the Large Hadron Collider has been grievously behind the times technologically. Sure, its giant array of superconducting magnets, kept cool by almost a hundred tons of liquid helium is pretty neat, and the muon spectrometer is no slouch. But the LHC hasn't put it all in a convenient smartphone app -- until now.

Jobs graced our pages again in January 1997, with other historical greats we've covered over the years. He looks right at home, even cocky, flanked by Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison and Stephen Hawking.

Part of the NASA Skylab satellite, which fell onto Western Australia in 1979, sits atop the Esperance museum roof. This particular segment of debris still has the ship's name visible on the side. The satellite, at 68 tonnes, was one of the biggest pieces of space junk to hit Earth.

Today is a day for fulfilling the dreams of PopSci's past, it would seem. Following the amphibious 70's-esque camping trailer, Jalopnik takes a whirl in the Auto-Gyro MTOsport, America's first police gyroplane, stirring up fond memories of all the fancy fliers we dreamed up in the 20s and 30s.

There are a lot of people out there dealing with some degree of hearing disability--one in six, by some estimates--and that audience is typically underserved when it comes to cinematic experience. Some films are screened with subtitles, but often at odd times. But Sony is working up a fix in its UK lab: a pair of glasses that places subtitles right in the user's field of view.

The Parkes Observatory opened on this day back in 1961 after ten years of planning and construction. 

Thanks to Aussie film The Dish, this radio telescope supplanted the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Siding Springs as the icon of antipodean space-watch hardware.

And that's not without some justification.

An invention we know best from being twirled around the fingers of chatty 80s teens, the elastic telephone cord actually dates from the 30s. The elastic is at the core, while the actual wires are coiled around the outside so the cord can stretch without the wires getting damaged. Then, when it's not in use, it curls up unobtrusively next to the phone, tangle-free.

It's an aviation story so cool we're kind of upset we didn't hear about it a month ago when it happened. Back on August 12th electrical and aerospace engineer Pascal Chretien, working with the backing of French company Solution F, made the world's first untethered, all-electric manned helicopter flight. And it didn't even show up on our radars--probably because he only reached an altitude of about one metre.

After being removed from the Lisa project, Steve Jobs focused his efforts on the Macintosh, which became the first commercially successful personal computer to use a mouse and GUI.  In 1984, Jobs demonstrated the machine in his first Apple keynote. A commercial directed by Ridley Scott aired during the Super Bowl. Apple bought all 39 advertising pages in Newsweek in November 1984. A year later, Apple gave desktop publishing a push by outfitting Macintoshes with Apple's LaserWriter printer, MacPublisher, and Aldus PageMaker.

Way before Siri, a decade before Apple's cell phone that we know and love existed in even its first incarnation, there was an iPhone. Just not the iPhone. Cidco's iPhone had some interesting similarities though, with a touchscreen for browsing the Web, and a full keyboard attached at the bottom.

These are wind turbines from Cullerin Range Wind Farm. According to Origin Energy they provides 100 per cent renewable and emissions free energy. Sweet! Plus, they don't look too obtrusive amongst the Australian landscape - quite nice among the white clouds. Aesthetically and energetically pleasing. Delightful. 

The idea of small, man portable, soldier-launched aerial drones has been catching on for some time now with military operations commanders, as they bring the unique situational awareness and reconnaissance capabilities of larger drone aircraft down to the platoon--or even the individual--level. Now, the U.S. Army is taking the idea to the next level, ordering its first batch of weaponised drones capable of launching from small, portable tube and suicide bombing a target from above.

New Mexico's Very Large Array, a giant radio telescope observatory which took a PopSci largeness prize recently, is named in a fine tradition of utilitarian monikers like the European Extremely Large Telescope and the ultimately impractical Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.

Automakers are doing all sorts of things to cars to make them smarter and more autonomous, as regular readers are aware. Here's a new one: General Motors wants to take self-parking cars to a new level, letting them drop off their drivers and go off in search of empty spaces on their own. It'll be more fuel-efficient than having humans circle the block waiting for a spot to open up, GM says.

Today in pretty space pics: a whirling image of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the stars above it circling the southern celestial pole. It's less a space pic than an Earth pic depicting really cool space searching technology. And it's absolutely breathtaking.

The idea of nanorockets zipping around your body delivering drugs sounds a little Osmosis Jonesy, but German researchers have developed a less toxic fuel that might make that possible.

Today in "Solutions to Problems Nobody Actually Has," a Lithuanian company called Etronika has created an app for Kinect that allows you to bank without the stress, difficulty, or efficiency of keyboards, mice, or touchscreens. Instead, you gesticulate wildly at your TV to check your balance, pay bills, or send copies of your bills to your phone.

The proud roboticists at Boston Dynamics compiled a nice new video featuring the greatest highlights from the life and times of BigDog, the big, playful, and very slightly creepy robotic dog. From robot pup playtime to a beach vacation in Thailand, BigDog has had plenty of adventures.

The message from outer space, that is. But this isn't communication from an alien source - the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex is a radio receiver for deep space phone calls from fellow humans (as well as robots) we've sent into space. What this means is it helps keeps spacecraft missions communicating with Earth, and allows them to send back important data and information. It's part of the larger Deep Space Network, an international network of dish communicators and receivers spread throughout the world and administrated by NASA.

The Yale Law Journal's Betsy Cooper wrote an essay examining our favorite Jeopardy! champion robot Watson, but from a new angle: Could Watson help judges make legal decisions?