The latest generation of prosthetics being developed in the US are incredibly advanced, funded by a $73-million grant from defence research agency DARPA (see our special report). But the latest piece of research kit is a cheap piece of videogame hardware: the controller to axe-man simulator Guitar Hero.
IEEE Spectrum reports how the controller was hacked by researchers at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab to respond to the electrical output of the twitching chest muscles tasked with controlling the lab's latest prototype prosthetic arms (pictured).
When a similar mass stranding occured in 2003, a predator was suspected of having scared the animals onto the beach. Military use of sonar has also been linked - and cleared of causing - whale strandings.
Now there's another disaster, on a bigger scale: a huge group of about 500 narwhals have trapped themselves in sea ice in Nunavut, in Arctic Canada. The trapped animals are being culled to prevent a more painful death by starvation or suffocation as the ice closes in around them.
Narwhals are Arctic cetaceans, with a fabulous tusk that is the subject of much folklore. Biologists now suspect that the tusk is a sensory organ that helps detect chemicals associated with prey, and ice formation. If it's the latter it sadly hasn't been of much use to the narwhals in Nunavut.
The Bush administration will soon be history. But we may be left with a computerised version of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to remember them by.
US defence giant and stealth-bomber manufacturer Northrop Grumman is patenting a system (see the patent here) to detect the "unknown unknowns" Rumsfeld famously warned against in 2002, when asked where the evidence was that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The Vatican, better known for catching up with the rest of the world on science (see Vatican admits Galileo was right) is leading by example on energy. It is due to switch on its solar panel roof today. The photovoltaics will power the papal audience hall, so that visitors to the pope this winter can rest assured their feet are not being warmed at the expense of the planet.
The Vatican hosted a scientific conference last year to discuss the ramifications of global warming and climate change, which it accepted was caused by human use of fossil fuels. Environmentalists praised the pope for his statement that the human race must listen to "the voice of the earth" or risk destroying the planet. Catherine Brahic, environment reporter
"We have discovered the secret of life," Francis Crick declared when he helped work out the structure of DNA. Well, not quite.
The secret of life is not so much DNA itself as the information stored in it. Much of this information - but not all of it - comes in the form of genes: the recipes for making proteins.
Where does this information come from? Put another way, how do genes evolve? How did simple cells acquire the blueprints need to make more complex animals, from the collagen that holds us together to the haemoglobin that carries oxygen in our blood to the crystallin proteins bending the light passing through your eyes as you read this?
It might all seem so unlikely at first glance, but thanks to the explosion in genome sequencing, we are increasingly able to trace the history of genes and uncover how they evolved.
Last week the list of teams formally registered for the Progressive Auto X Prize was announced. Entrants are in the running for $10 million to create commercially viable cars that can go 100 miles on a single gallon of petrol, or the equivalent energy in another form.
As this XPrizecars blog noticed, although 22 teams are registered, only 20 have been identified. The organisers say only that the others "have been accepted, but remain confidential". The blog suggests the "stealth" teams could be Fisker - known to be working on plug-in hybrids - or even auto giant GM.
It sounds like something a delirious grad student might hallucinate but it has just won Sue Lynn Lau of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia top prize in "Dance Your PhD", a competition run by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Lau and four of her lab mates took on those personas to explain in dance Lau's PhD "The role of vitamin D in beta cell function."
The competition's three other winners were interpretations of PhDs about how the brain processes regular and irregular verbs, interactions between haemoglobin molecules, and a DNA-bending protein called TelK.
"Everyone who wants to get married or apply for a birth certificate must plant a tree," Syahrum Syah Setia, the head of Balikpapan city's environmental impact management agency is reporting having said. "The city's condition is already worrying, and we must act to tackle global warming."
Balikpapan city is in East Kalimantan and like much of Indonesia, the
surrounding region is being deforested by mining and timber companies.
The plant a tree initiative is, I'm sure, well-meaning but I can't help
be sceptical.
An astronaut's lost tool bag is probably not what you would expect to see when you look up at the night sky. But that's just what a man in Brockville, Ontario, Canada, captured on videotape from his backyard observatory last Saturday.
Who says cemetaries are dead spaces? A town south of Barcelona in Spain has decided to make theirs dual-purpose by placing solar panels on top of mausoleums. Hey presto! A final resting place and a power plant, all wrapped up in one.
This is not environmentally sound of me, but I'd rather be cremated than buried. However, if I did have a tomb I would like to think it could multi-task.
The science of sustainability is a mess. In 16 years it seems to have gone backwards as the world rushes on towards a frankly terrifying future. It is time it got its act together.
I was at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro back in 1992. The whole world seemed to be there, promising to find a way out of our growing environmental predicament: climate change, disappearing species, fouled-up oceans, spreading deserts, thinning ozone layer, frying rainforests and the rest. Scientists were at the fore, promising to find a path to a sustainable future.
What happened? Well we got treaties on biodiversity and climate change. Scientists have played a blinder at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - providing certainty where there was confusion. They even picked up a Nobel prize last year for their efforts.
Obese people are "functionally disabled", according to a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada yesterday.
Several Canadian airlines were appealing against a decision that allowed obese people two seats on a flight for the price of one. The Supreme Court chucked out the appeal, meaning that obese people will continue to get two seats for one.
Will the decision stoke the war on fat? It seems fair enough to me, but then you could argue that you pay an excess if you want to take heavy amounts of luggage, so you should pay more if you weigh twice as much as next person.
Anyway, how do obese people like being described as "functionally disabled"? They already face all sorts of increased risks from deafness to dying in a car crash.
Air Canada, Air Canada Jazz and WestJet are the only airlines that will be forced to give obese people an extra seat, but it is not clear how they will measure those fat enough to qualify. Will this lead to people travelling in fat suits to get a bit of extra seat room? Rowan Hooper, online news editor
Michael Crichton would have been proud of science yesterday. When researchers announced the completion of much of the woolly mammoth genome, most of the news stories focused on the prospect of resurrecting the ancient elephants, which went extinct about 5000 years ago.
One author, genomicist Stephan Schuster, estimates that it would cost $10 million to bring mammoths back by modifying elephant DNA to resemble that of mammoths, throw the hybrid genome into an elephant who would bring the beast to term.
"This is something that could work, though it will be tedious and expensive," he told the New York Times.
Here's a simple but effective idea that's guaranteed to make
opening the curtains in the morning a lot more fun. Florian Kräutli, a Swiss designer, has stitched a network of regularly-spaced magnets into a sheet of fabric. The result is a highly versatile curtain that
can be pushed and pulled into whatever shape takes your fancy.
The Magnetic Curtain can give truly stunning effects on a
large scale, although it's perhaps a little clunky over smaller windows. It's
not commercially available yet, but could be soon through Droog Design.
The internet puts a wealth of information at the fingertips of people the world over. But a good proportion of us seem unable, or unwilling, to use it. You're probably as likely now as 20 years ago to hear someone ask their co-workers if anyone can name the capital of Peru, or give the approximate height of Mount Everest.
Here's a tool that designed to silence those latter-day trivia hunters. "Let me Google that for you" presents the user with a Google-esque search page. Just type in whatever it is you've just been asked and the site generates a link you can forward to your office mate.
This actually harks back to the Planetary Society's beginnings. In its early years, the only form of manned space exploration it favoured was an (international) Mars expedition. All other ideas that involved humans in space were counterproductive and undesirable, to hear the Planetary Society tell it.
This obsession with Mars was a bad idea then, and it's a bad idea now. However, some of the reasons advanced against it strike me as poor - sufficiently poor that they weaken attempts to argue for a more systematic and balanced space effort.
As many have heard, the Mars rover Spirit is clinging to life, with its solar arrays covered with dust from a recent dust storm. Even with everything else shut down, it needs some energy to keep its electronics warm during the frigid Martian night. If it can't charge its battery sufficiently during the day, it will freeze to death overnight. (A dead battery is what killed the Mars Pathfinder lander.)
Inevitably, people are asking: why don't the rovers have some kind of wiper system to sweep dust off them? The (usually) unspoken question is, how could the rovers' designers have been so stupid as to overlook this?
Well, in fact, they thought of it. They thought hard about it. Dust accumulating on the solar arrays was clearly a big problem - that's why they could only officially promise a 90-day mission. They badly wanted to include some sort of dust-clearing system. But there were compelling reasons why they couldn't.
It's awkward for a woman to say no to an unsuitable suitor. But cushioning the blow with a fake smile probably won't make the poor guy feel any better. New research shows that social rejects can discern fake smiles from the real kind.
This ability might help social outcasts decide whom to shower with attention and resources and whom to ignore, say Michael Bernstein of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and colleagues in a recent paper (Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02187.x).
They tested 32 undergraduates for their ability to tell true smiles due to actual glee, from the phoney kind practiced by politicians, flight attendants and used car salesmen.
There are already a number of web-based tools that can change the age, sex or race of an uploaded photo. But ThatsMyFace can do all that and then make it come true.
Upload two photos to the site - one forward facing and one profile view - and it will more-or-less automatically generate a 3D rendered image of your face. That can be changed, for example to look like you might in 20 years time, and the result made into a life-size 3D mask for $50. You can also have versions of your face made as if you were the opposite sex, or even a different race.
Watch a video demo by clicking below to read more.
The puppet masters of the New Media, including the Republican Party's online campaign director, revealed trade secrets at MIT last night on how technology shaped the 2008 presidential election, and how politics as we know it will never be the same.
The two things that struck me about the long, two-hour forum was how technology is engaging young voters like never before, and how the data mining and decentralisation of this year's campaigns are only a taste of what's to come.
Ian Rowe of MTV noted how in each of the last two US presidential elections, an additional 4 million 18- to 29-year-olds came out to vote - an achievement for which he claimed partial credit.
Last month, we brought you a round-up of first messages sent using the pioneering technologies of yesterday. We also asked you to send us your ideas for future modes of communication and the first messages sent using them.
We received around 80 entries, some funny, some baffling, but most very inventive. We've now chosen a winner. Read on for the winning entry and some runners up that we liked.
We had just finished putting the finishing touches to this week's Science Fiction Special when we got the press release for Alexander Besher's new sci-fi book, which is typical because it would have fitted in perfectly.
The book is called Manga Man, and the whole thing is available to read online for free. It's not just a traditional print novel, but comes with a swathe of pictures, video and audio.
More unusually (at least by Western standards) is that the book is
being published direct to mobile phones. Reading novels on mobiles
hasn't really taken off over here, but it's all the rage in Japan, where the novels are sent in installments as text messages.
But what grabbed my attention was the bit about scanning a barcode on a T-shirt to be able to read it.
The Planetary Society said today that NASA should focus on sending humans to asteroids and Mars instead of first aiming for the Moon. But some say returning to the Moon is an essential stepping-stone to more distant destinations.
NASA should learn how to walk before it runs, by going to the Moon before sending humans to Mars, says Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman: "I think the difficulty there has been underestimated."
Borman spoke at a rare event: a public reunion of the Apollo 8 mission's three astronauts, held on Thursday at the Newseum in Washington, DC.
But now there is better news. GetRobo has just published an interview with Hideki Kozima, Keepon's developer. He explains that the $30,000 "Keepon Pro" is designed primarily for those wishing to conduct their own psychological experiments, which is where Keepon has been most useful so far.
A cheaper version of Keepon, lacking the precision for those
experiments, is promised. Here's hoping he (she?) retains those dancing
abilities. You can see a video of Keepon in action by clicking the
continue reading link below.
The US Supreme Court may have ruled against whales today in striking down a ban on Navy sonar in some areas, but supporters of the marine mammals may have bigger fish to fry.
The Supreme Court decision reverses a lower court ruling, supported by environmental groups, which limited the US Navy's use of sonar in areas that might affect whales. The Natural Resources Defense Council and some scientists argue that sonar bothers the deep-diving mammals so much that they bee-line to the surface and suffer decompression syndrome - known as 'the bends' among human divers.
We've written in the past about how 3D printers are getting cheaper, becoming commodities like regular printers that are affordable to own, and could even let you make many things you currently buy in your own home instead. You can even build your own 3D printer from a kit for around $1500.
But the price of the printer is not the only barrier to more widespread adoption. Most commercially-available 3D printers must be loaded with a particular material used to build designs. And that can be expensive.
The sculpture in the picture was made by a forthcoming new design from Mcor that uses normal A4 office paper as a feedstock instead, as well as a PVA-based glue.
Models can be as wide and deep as a piece of A4, and as tall as 15 centimetres. I would be really impressed if you could use scrap paper - a commodity which is always in strong supply.
Flu Trends nails the start of the flu season by measuring the peak in Google searches for "flu symptoms" and similar phrases. They found such upsurges exactly matched US government data on when the annual flu season started over several years, and even caught it earlier. All very neat.
But we know flu season arrives in temperate zones every winter. What good is knowing exactly when? The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, US health officials say.
Just one week after Barack Obama's historic election victory, there's a tempest brewing around a choice he has yet to make - one that could generate some tough political questions around the lab.
Scientists, as a group, have largely been supportive of Obama. In fact, what surprised me during the primary season was how many scientists told me they voted for Obama, even while acknowledging that Hillary Clinton was the stronger candidate on science policy.
Now Obama is set to appoint his nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, one of the most important members of his inner circle, and the choice could divide scientists along lines of gender politics.
Obama has two candidates in mind to replace the current secretary, Henry Paulson, come January. One is Tim Geithner, 47, the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The other is Larry Summers, an economics professor and former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton.
"Just in
case [we don't] we'd better have a
plan," he said. Geoengineering plans mean we try and take direct control of the climate ourselves.
I first spoke to Caldeira about geoengineering a few years
back when he published a modelling paper looking at the effectivness of spraying
tiny sulphur particles up into the atmosphere to bounce a portion of the sun's
energy back out into space.
At the time, he told me that he had been trying to
come up with a way of showing such schemes were hair-brained ideas but had
instead found they might work.
As an avid backpacker I can understand the desire to conquer the tallest peak in a range. To reach the summit of the tallestgeologically ancient mountain on the planet, however, would be a matter of burrowing downwards - it sits beneath thick layers of ice.
Researchers investigating the mysterious Gamburtsev Mountains in East Antarctica have also found that these peaks, which are blanketed by ice sheets 4 kilometres thick, are not volcanic in origin as expected
(Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL035564).
The findings have raised eyebrows in the geological community. It had been assumed that since the Gamburtsevs are not near any active continental plate boundaries their origin had to be volcanic.
The image left (click for a larger view) shows the tiniest representation of the new US president yet. Each face is built from roughly 150 million carbon nanotubes.
As the artist/mechanical engineer that made them, John Hart, puts it "that's about how many Americans voted on November 4". Although, of course, only about 53% of those nanotubes actually voted Obama. For more images, and to see how they are made visit Hart's site.
"The first line of coconut trees has disappeared" - Kiribati
inhabitant
While the world dithers about tackling climate change, in some parts of the world people are running out of time. In Florida sea level rises can be worked around to some extent - condos can be put on stilts and moved away from the shoreline. But on some islands you can only move back so far before you have to start worrying about the water at your back door as well as the water in front.
Here are five islands whose inhabitants are going to need a new home soon:
1. The Guardian reports today that the new president of the Maldives will be putting part of the country's profits from tourism into a very special - and unusual - fund: one that will be used to buy a new, climate-change-friendly home. With its highest point reaching only 2.4 metres, the Maldives is one of the lowest-lying nations in the world and risks being submerged by rising sea-levels.
2. Tuvalu is another small pacific island state, and after the Maldives the second-lowest nation in the world. At its highest, it is 5 metres above sea-level and could be gone by the middle of this century. In 2002, the government was said to have hired two international law firms to look into suing polluting nations for effectively evicting its citizens.
Over the weekend, Hurricane Paloma set another of those records that sends chills down spines in the Caribbean - for the first time major hurricanes formed in five successive months, from July through November. And the total energy carried by storms this year is double that of last year.
The hurricane season in the north Atlantic officially runs from June to the end of November. The odd storm may blow up in May or December, but usually the most storms and the strongest ones come from mid-August to mid-October. By early November, residents of hurricane-prone areas usually can relax.
Not this year. Paloma formed as a tropical depression off Nicaragua on Wednesday morning, and reached tropical storm strength Thursday. That night it reached hurricane strength, and then turned northeast toward the Cayman Islands and Cuba. It peaked at Category 4 strength on Saturday, and weakened slightly before hitting Cuba.
New Scientist's website has a new design - showcasing what we believe is the best of our content, alongside what is most read and most commented on by the most important audience we have - you.
After talking to thousands of our readers and users, we have made some major changes to our website.
These are intended to bring the sheer joy and delight of New Scientist to even more people than ever before - with a clearer design, dual navigation by content type as well as topic, and an enhanced search function.
Honda has some good news for those who find walking a chore. Their latest product - catchily named the Walking Assist Device With Bodyweight Support System or perhaps WADWBSS - might look like a bicycle saddle on stilts, but it's been carefully designed to support bodyweight, reduce stress on the knees and help people get up steps and stay in crouching positions.
The gadget clearly builds on Honda's Walking Assist Device, unveiled earlier in the year, designed to help the elderly or those recuperating from medical treatments. The latest version is apparently more inclusive, and would suit those "standing in long lines" or "who run around to make deliveries" according to Honda.
You can see a video of Honda's new walking device in action by clicking below.
The latest battleground for manufacturers of digital SLR cameras is high definition video - and the results are stunning.
Using their large image sensors - the same size as a 35-mm film frame - to capture video unleashes the quality of their lenses, and that makes for amazing footage. You can see what I mean in this clip.
That video - shot on Canon's new HD video capable camera and made in a single day - looks so good because the lenses in all but a few purpose-built, high-end digital video cameras cannot compete with the quality and flexibility of the lenses used by stills photographers.
The latest high-profile figure to knock on Obama's door is Al Gore. His team has pushed out an ad which boldly asks "Now what?" and declares part of the answer must be a new and improved US power grid.
President-elect Barack Obama has short listed firebrand environmental lawyer Robert F Kennedy, Jr as a potential head of the US Environmental Protection Agency according to the Washington Post and Bloomberg.
As a prosecuting attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and environmental watchdog Riverkeeper, Kennedy - the nephew of former US President John F Kennedy - boasts an impressive track record as protector of the nation's waters, air and open spaces.
One could even argue that he has already served as the de facto EPA head for the last 8 years, as Bush appointees used the Cabinet seat to plunder public lands for oil and gas, gut the Endangered Species Act, and block CO2 emission regulations.
There's been much talk about whether Michael Crighton's climate change scepticism undermined his legacy. I hope not.
A commanding presence (boy, he was tall, charismatic and handsome), the last time I bumped into him was at lunch organised by the US Embassy in London. Crichton was there to talk up his potboiler, State of Fear, an environmental thriller which portrayed global warming as a scientific hoax.
I was disappointed. True, there were factual flaws. (Then again, this did not seem to prevent some leading scientists - Sir David King comes to mind - from adoring the equally ludicrous eco-catastrophe movie, The Day After Tomorrow). What bothered me was that Crighton seemed to be losing his golden touch when it came to picking the right issue at the right time.
Some weeks ago two US firms jointly announced a $100,000 donation to Britain's World War II codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. The centre is acknowledged as, not only crucial to ending the war, but also the home of the first digital computers. The cash is certainly needed, because the historic site is falling into rack and ruin.
I said at the time that the need for US firms - PGP and IBM - to rescue a piece of crumbling UK history should should have shamed the British government.
Perhaps that's why this morning, English Heritage, a unit of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, announced a £330,000 grant to Bletchley Park. The money is to go towards saving the mansion house that was surrounded by the scruffy huts inside which Alan Turing and colleagues broke codes and made computing history.
As Barack Obama starts receiving briefings from the CIA ahead of his inauguration, he has some big decisions to make and promises to fulfill. As far as his daughters are concerned, chief among them will be the appointment of the new First Dog.
What breed should it be? Malia 10, wants a "Goldendoodle", a hybrid Golden Retriever and Poodle. Goldendoodles are hypoallergenic, apparently, so are popular among allergy sufferers such as Malia.
However, according to an American Kennel Club survey reported in the Chicago Tribune, voters said they would like the Obamas to adopt a purebred poodle.
Incidentally, the two current First Dogs (Barney and Miss Beazley) are Scottish terriers, and have their own government website. The pedigree of the current First Cat (Willie), was not available at the time of writing.
We all indulge in a bit of infantile toilet humour from time to time. But it's not so funny if you're one of the 2.5 billion people worldwide (that's a third of the human population) with no pot to piss in, and nowhere proper to have a dump.
Aside from the sheer smell, squalour, unpleasantness and inconvenience of having nowhere to go except in a gutter in the street, lack of sanitation is an environmental nightmare and a major factor in the spread of disease.
So top marks to the Swiss who've produced the world's first practical compendium explaining how to make every type of toilet system imaginable, from simple holes in the ground to the flush toilets that folks in richer countries take for granted. And, it's all for free, so this is a completely shameless plug for the authors.
This could be the most fun you can have with a white board. Eness, an 'interactive experiences' company based in Melbourne, Australia, has created a system that makes it possible to play the classic computer game Pong on an everyday whiteboard.
"What you are seeing is a real live demonstration of our physics based
engine responding to it's real life surroundings," they say. "The computer sees and
recognises the black shapes on the whiteboard and the virtual ball
behaves accordingly."
There are no other details about the workings of the setup, but take a look at the high-speed action-packed video after the continue reading link and give us your own thoughts. Colin Barras, online technology reporter
One day after that scientists announced they might have the technology to clone extinct animals, raising the spectre of a real Jurassic Park, the Park's creator has gone the way of the last velociraptor.
Michael Crichton lost his battle with cancer this week. I'm a big fan of his books, though for a science journalist they are a kind of guilty pleasure. His penchant for creating drama out of science relied on also creating some pretty fantastical scientific scenarios.
Crichton always shrugged off the criticism from scientists concerned that he was misrepresenting them and their work. Here's what he had to say about his portrayal of scientists in a 1999 essay in Science:
"I sometimes think scientists really don't notice that their colleagues have flaws. But in my experience, scientists are very human people: Some are troubled, some are deceitful, petty, or vain. I know a scientist so forgetful he didn't notice he'd left his wife behind at the airport until the plane was in the air. I once was at a party with Jacques Monod when a gorgeous young woman - a PhD bacteriologist - came up to him and said, "Oh, Dr. Monod, you are the most beautiful man in the room." And he preened. But why not? He was very handsome in a sort of Camus-existential-Gauloise-smoking way."
Some 55% of the votes in Brevard County, Florida, home to NASA's space shuttle, went to John McCain on Tuesday. But after Barack Obama's historic victory, the space-minded Obamanauts can't be anything but pleased.
The fledgling group of Obama supporters, which has been in existence for little more than a month, has generated considerable buzz, signing on some high-profile members including Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart.
But now that Obama has won, the group isn't quite ready to disband. "We're trying to decide what do," says Obamanauts leader Tim Bailey, a space education contractor from Titusville, Florida. The group may start a campaign to raise awareness about space policy, Bailey says.
The race for the White House wasn't the only crucial vote yesterday. Five experts at the US Federal Communications Commission were also voting on the future of wireless broadband - and in a unanimous decision (pdf) agreed that tech firms can create gadgets that use the soon-to-be-unused chunk of radio spectrum currently used by TV broadcasts.
Those "white spaces" will be freed up when the US has switched completely to digital terrestrial TV sometime next year. You can read about the idea to use white spaces in more detail in this article.
The battle to use them for a new class of gadgets has been a long one, that pitted Google against Dolly Parton. Now the coalition of companies including the search and advertising giant has won out, it's time to look at how this will revolutionise portable gadgets. Click continue reading to find out.
Even as the votes were being cast, some said going green would have to wait. But the president-elect has been saying it has to be done now: for the planet, for American energy security - and for the good of an economy that badly needs government investment to kick start growth. Green jobs for a green economy.
Much of the blueprint is there. I reported last month from California, where they are busy legislating a carbon-cutting programme deliberately designed to be translatable into national terms. And where entrepreneurs, backed by billions of dollars of venture capital from Silicon Valley, are ready to invest in solar and wind power, and second-generation biofuels and much else in a huge scale.
All they want is a green light for the legal fast-tracking and modest tax guarantees that will make it all profitable.
And we are not talking about bits and pieces here. We are talking very big time indeed. As David Mills, head of solar thermal company Ausra, in Palo Alto, told me: "In the coming decades, clean energy is going to be ten times bigger than the internet and IT combined."
Nancy Block, founder and owner of the Center for Egg Options, an egg broker based in Northbrook, Illinois, says there's been a dramatic increase in the number of women applying to be egg donors. She claims she has seen a steep increase in the number of new donors, as well as an increase in former donors who have decided to come back and donate again.
Until now, her agency would typically get 25 applicants per week for egg donation and one or two for gestational surrogacy. That's recently risen to about 32 egg donors and three or four gestational surrogate applicants per week.
The group is concerned that any action they take at sea will be used in a court trial against two of its activists, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, who were arrested earlier this year. The pair were involved in an under-cover investigation which suggested that whale meat caught during "research whaling" is illegally smuggled off the boats.
Whatever the result today, as Americans head to the polls, many people will find themselves wondering what might have been. Whether there could have been a "perfect" presidential candidate.
Back in April, we covered a project from political scientists at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, that aimed to find out what that mythical candidate would have been like. They created a fake campaign website that anyone could edit, using software tools like those behind Wikipedia. Now it's time to examine the results...
A year ago, when Google announced its Lunar X PRIZE - a $30 million race to land an unmanned robot on the moon - NASA was "kind of an interested bystander" according to Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California.
A lot has changed in a year, and last week, US company Odyssey Moon Ventures, the first team to complete registration for the Google prize, announced a partnership with the space agency.
This is something of a symbiotic relationship: Odyssey Moon gets access to NASA's technical data and engineering expertise, including their latest hover test vehicle - click on the continue reading link to see it in action - while NASA can take advantage of Odyssey Moon's business model to help them commercialise their technology.