No, not that "drone porn":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8yldV53ic. I'm talking about those gorgeously sweeping aerial videos coming out of the "hobbyist":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/7/16/watch-this-sweeping-aerial-drone-footage-of-detroit--2
A handful of gas stations in Northern California made history this week by becoming the first to offer algae-based diesel fuel at the pump. At select stations in Redwood City, Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose, the algae fuel company Solazyme will be of…
Rosneft, the Russian state-owned oil behemoth, just signed a deal to purchase TNK-BP, Russia’s third-largest oil producer, for $55 billion. The deal makes Rosneft the largest publicly-traded oil producer. It’s a boon for private enterprise, especiall…
I know. I can hardly believe it, either. After an impressive 25 flights that spanned an equally impressive 22-year career and 123 _million_ miles; after endless parades and flyovers and misty-eyed rooftop adieus, the hulking Endeavour has "finally ma…
Economic sanctions placed on Iran by the United States and European Union and gradually tightened over the last year have begun to strain Iran; the country's currency has tumbled as oil production has "hit its lowest point in 23 years":http://www.cnn…
Aside from the assurance that you've made a genuine contribution to humanity, winning the Nobel Prize has an upside.
There's a lot of reasons humanity is having such a hard time cutting back on greenhouse gases. It's not just fake scientists and deniers, and/or the dollars of heavy industry. There is also the actually real issue of vagueness. A study out this week
It's been 14 years since the emergency rafts full of netizens started to ditch the sinking ships of websearch services Altavista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, WebCrawler, MSN and AOL Search.
Here's one to add to the so-called Triple D (dull - dirty - dangerous) drone rationale: Dam. Researchers with the U.S. Geologic Survey, the Federal Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service are utilizing small unmanned aerial systems…
Laos is a small, mountainous, landlocked country that's ruled by one of the few one-party communist regimes left in the world. That's not normally a recipe for economic success, and the Southeast Asian country ranks near the bottom of the world for p…
The electric car has finally arrived. Tesla, eccentric Elon Musk's automotive baby, has finally moved on from stuffing lithe Lotuses full of batteries to create its Roadster and has released the Model S, a super sedan for upper-middle class, middle-a…
In a place that's become synonymous with all the moral, ethical, legal, and political quandaries posed by the robo-lords of the new "bugsplat" warfare, the thought of insect-like drones buzzing over northern Pakistan may not immediately take on celeb…
Spend any time drinking in Japan -- and if you're in Japan, you likely will -- and you'll notice that for all the plethora of sub-brands of beer in the country, they're all pretty much variations of malted macrobrews produced by the four titans of th…
Joe Biden summed up the essence of Obama’s reelection campaign months ago. “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive." These duel sentiments will be showcased at the DNC over the next few days, the slightest glimmers of hope amplified to t…
There's little doubt that the much-acclaimed, Bill Gates-backed Khan Academy is chasing a Good Thing: providing online video courses and educational materials to all. It doesn't get much nobler than that—of course the world wins if everyone with an i…
It only took 40 years. And yes, Washington still disputes Hanoi's claim that up to 4 million Vietnamese suffered contact with the defoliant, which was dumped en masse in a U.S. air campaign to scorch away the dense jungle cover under which guerilla f…
Three-year-old Emma has a condition known as arthrogryposis and, as a result, she's left with a super-limited ability to use her arms. Thankfully, we live in the future and doctors at a Delaware hospital were able to 3D print her a suitable exoskelet…
In less than 24 hours we'll know whether the Mars Curiosity Rover, the next in NASA's line of vehicles designed to probe one of Earth's closest planetary neighbors, plummeted to the Martian surface as it's been programmed to, or not. Jim Adams is bit…
It may not crack whips and fight Nazis, at least not yet. But it still sounds pretty badass: An interdisciplinary research team out of Vanderbilt University is using a semi-autonomous SUAVe - their very own micro Indiana Drone (sorry) - to map the ru…
To all you goofball exercisers who drive your giant honkin’ SUVs to the gym to fart around on a piece of cardio equipment indoors on a sunny day, here’s one near and dear to your heart: the inventor of the home treadmill passed away last week. Willia…
Fracking is horrible for the environment, right? Well, a large body of evidence does say that pumping the ground full of chemical-laced water isn’t a good idea, but as is always the case with science, researchers are now popping up that oppose the co…
The only thing holding me back from being a cyborg -- aside from cost, science, a robo-averse girlfriend, and a fear of being stared at -- is the fact that once you go bot, you probably can't go back. I like being flesh and blood, even if my old sack…
There's a specific and stereotypical set of activities that spring to mind when you imagine what prison inmates do with their spare time. If there's a yard, they probably hang out, lift weights, get in fights, organize gangs. If there's not a yard, t…
