Environment – General Motors Foundation (GM) has announced that it will be ending its support of the Heartland Institute, which is known for its skepticism toward global warming. GM has supported the thinktank for 20 years, and the move to cut ties with it has been cheered by groups...

Environment – Thanks to a visualization from NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio (maybe shortened to GSFCSVS) we are now privy to something that Van Gogh might have created, were he an animator. The visualization, which displays the currents of the...

Animal Rights – Doctors and zoologists have been researching American Black Bears and they found something interesting. The bears are able to pull off a feat some of the most critically wounded humans wish they could manage — they can heal themselves while they sleep. Researchers...

Social Issues – Those living in the First World often forget about a nasty disease called Tuberculosis (TB). However according to Reuters, a new form of TB, also known as the “white plague,” is on the rise in the industrialized and wealthy areas of the West, Africa, and...

Science & Tech – A new Samsung television set has privacy advocates frowning and possibly some hackers (villainous or not) pondering the possibilities. With new high definition cameras installed, the new line of televisions grow closer to computers, and with that comes concerns about...

Science & Tech – The first section of the West Coast’s “Electric Highway” has opened, a move that shows a previously unseen embrace of the electric car. This piece, a 160 mile expanse of Interstate 5, features 8 electric stations to support electric vehicles, which...

Science & Tech – A prototype of a device to “jam” a person’s voice has been developed by Japanese researchers. Called the SpeechJammer, it has sparked not only the imagination but some fears. The SpeechJammer is relatively simple: it plays a speaker’s voice...

Environment – In another example of how nature can inspire innovation and design, Taiwanese Qisda Corporation has developed an LED lamp that mimics the luminosity of a coral reef. The Coral Reef LED Floor Light features three “pads” of lights, based around similarly...

Just Weird – The latest creature to be added to the stuff nightmares are made of is an entirely new family of amphibians found in India. Researchers at University of Delhi uncovered the Chikilidae, an earthworm-like type of amphibian that belongs of a similar family to amphibians known...

Science & Tech – Darpa wants to bring something very much like blockbuster hit Avatar to life, and they’re willing to spend $7 million on it. The research wing of the Pentagon is working on robot-surrogate technology, which will allow robots to do the “dirty work”...

Environment – The recent burning of a 3,500 year old tree in Florida has earned the local landmark an unexpected, possible future – it is a candidate for cloning. The tree, known as The Senator, was initially thought to be burnt in an act of arson, was actually taken by nature,...

Science & Tech – The world has come a long way since Tim O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried and soon soldiers won’t have to “carry” heavy equipment anymore, thanks to a LS3, a headless robotic mule designed to do the heavy lifting for them. LS3, a...

Social Issues – There is another threat to internet privacy in the works, this time in the EU. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is seeing protests from privacy advocates, outraged users, and Amnesty International. ACTA seeks to establish “international standards to...

Science & Tech – There’ll come a time when transatlantic and transpacific travel as we know them will cease to exist. Unfortunately—or luckily, depending on your outlook—that’s about 50 million to 200 million years away. Thanks to the ever-shifting earth...

Just Weird – Usually, the lingering smell of your mate’s perfume is enough to give you flashbacks, but do you think you would have chosen him or her just based on smell? Judith Prays thinks so, and in 2010 she developed the “Pheromone Party” centered on the idea of...

Just Weird – While it’s not quite as titillating as sexting, you can now send an arguably more intimate kind of personal message to someone with what is being called a “kiss messenger,” or, of course, “Kissenger.” The Kissenger is a pair of robots, each...

Environment – Form meets function (or at least, a different but valuable function) with the new Catalytic Clothing experiment from designer Helen Storey and polymer chemist Tony Ryan. “Self-cleaning” clothing is in their sights, and it may help all of us to try it on. Ryan came...

Science & Tech – As science progresses, technology becomes, well, more badass. Artist Jalila Essaidi and a team of scientists from the U.S., Germany, South Korea, and the Netherlands have collaboratively developed “bulletproof skin.” Like I said…Badass. The...

Human Rights – In what comes as no surprise, Apple’s audits of the abysmal Chinese factories that make its products shows an even greater toll than the already well known Foxconn worker suicides. It also reveals the company’s rather indifferent approach to these conditions,...

Science & Tech – A recent study has attempted to identify why it is that liberals and conservatives can’t agree. What they’ve found is that people of different political affiliations respond to negative stimuli differently. It suggests biology determines a person’s...

Environment – An international group of scientists have identified a molecule that deconstructs pollution in the atmosphere and turns it into clouds that help cool the planet. As a compound, it helps to break down greenhouse gasses and could prove very fruitful in helping make our lives...

Social Issues – In yet another instance of science fiction meeting reality, scientists have discovered a way to predict how long someone will live by measuring their genes in some of the earliest stages of life. Gattaca anyone? Apparently it’s all in the telomeres, which are...

Social Issues – The journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science has published a study showing that people given terrible names by their parents wind up achieving less, being dumber, and struggling socially for the remainder of their lives. Oddly enough, they’re also...

Social Issues – Great news for the “dazed and confused” – It turns out that smoking marijuana is nowhere near as bad for your lungs as smoking cigarettes! A twenty-year study was just released which suggests that smoking a joint or two during the week, doesn’t...

Animal Rights – A recent study on mice with a condition that causes them to rapidly age has found that injecting them with the stem-cells of younger mice slows the process considerably. The procedure has extended the life of some mice up to three times as long as they were estimated to...

Social Issues – Scientists at Cornell University are currently working on what has been deemed a “time cloak,” an object that can make it appear as if an action did not happen. While it lasts only 40 trillionths of a second, that’s still pretty damned impressive. The...

Environment – The future of solar energy is on its way-and this time, it’s in the form of an awesome hi-tech new paint. The environmentally conscious may soon be able to swap their cumbersome solar paneling for a new paint designed to generate electricity through the means of...