Within the confines of the PopSci universe, the Da Vinci surgical robot requires no introduction. But while we've seen Da Vinci do some amazing things--most notably, perform prostate surgery, though lacing the football and making paper planes were pretty cool too--we're always thrilled to see the dexterous machine do something else. And so we bring you this footage of Da Vinci, peeling a grape like peeling grapes is easy.

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."

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.

It's not enough for the US military to be able to monitor you from afar. The US Army wants its drones to know you through and through, reports Danger Room, and it is imbuing them with the ability to recognise you in a crowd and even to know what you are thinking and feeling. Like a best friend that at any moment might vaporise you with a hellfire missile.

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.

Barely a day goes by without a new development in smart car technology, from computerised cars to driving directions. Now researchers in Switzerland are developing cars with the ultimate gift of intelligence: The ability to read our minds.

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.

Today at an event in New York City, Amazon announced its new family of Kindles, and it's probably the biggest, or at least most visible, update in the line's history. The three new "traditional" Kindles continue Amazon's trend of "cheaper and smaller," including two touch-based Kindles (one Wi-Fi-only and one 3G-enabled) and one ridiculously cheap non-touch version. But the big news: Amazon's first tablet, a 7-inch model called the Kindle Fire that's priced low enough in the tablet marketplace to ride alongside the iTunes cards and chewy in the impulse buys section.

That fun video of the BigDog robot we shared last week may have been impressive, but apparently the robot is about to be eclipsed by another member of its own family.

In another plus for Australia's bid for the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, Australia now plays home to another big supercomputer, one specially geared for crunching the amounts of data produced by such projects.

It's an innovation fit for a Cold War spy novel: a means to transmit secret messages via microbe. Dubbed steganography by printed arrays of microbes (yup: SPAM), the technique involves encoding messages in the colours of glowing bacteria, which can be later unlocked with antibiotics.

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.

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.

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.