Japanese officials report they've produced natural gas from underwater methane hydrate, a frozen mix of water and methane known as "burning ice." Previous experiments have successfully extracted gas from on-shore deposits, but this is the first time we've been able to do it with deep sea reserves.

President Obama promised to make "meaningful progress" on the issue of climate change in the State of the Union Address last night.

When it comes time for an aging skyscraper to be put out to pasture, it's best to do so slowly. For buildings higher than 100 meters tall, there's no easy path to demolition. Sure, you could blow it up, but the cleanup would be brutal. You could slam it with a wrecking ball, but that's a little heavy-handed, don't you think?

Rain or shine, the battle of the Mississippi rages on. The vital shipping lane that supports middle-American economies from the Upper-Midwest to New Orleans is once again in dire straits as the Army Corps of Engineers struggles to control Big Muddy - this time by making it deeper. Wracked by the worst (and longest) droughts in memory, the Midwest and the river are critically short on water, so short that the shallowest stretch of the river between Cairo, Ill. and St. Louis could become unnavigable in the next month, and the Corps of Engineers is just about out of geoengineering options to mitigate the problem, NPR reports.

Sometimes, a trick gets pulled off better in nature than it does in a laboratory. That might be the case with new research claiming fireflies' unique lanterns can be reverse-engineered for LED lights, making the bulbs as much as 55 percent more efficient.

Absolute zero - that's zero degrees Kelvin, or -273 degrees C - is understood by textbook definition to be the absolute coldest anything can be, a temperature threshold at which atoms actually lose all of their kinetic energy and stop moving completely (or at which entropy reaches its lowest value). There can be nothing stiller than completely still, and hence absolute zero is as low-energy as something can go. Right? But researchers have discovered that's not exactly the case. By messing with the distribution of high- and low-energy atoms within a system, a team of physicists at the University of Munich in Germany has created what it defines as a negative temperature system - one that has a temperature south of absolute zero.