Top News Online

The important thing about Caenorhabditis elegans, also called a roundworm or nematode, is how simple it is. A mouse may be small, but it’s still a mammal, and composed of many billions of cells. Even a fruit fly is a relatively complex organism, and as scientists manipulate its genes they see all kinds of emergent properties arising from the incredible ...

In hindsight, it’s not surprising the Mitsubishi MiEV EV I drove barely made it to 50 miles rather than its rated 62 miles (100 km). It was a dark and chilly if not stormy early December night and that killed the range. When you drive an EV, “your mileage may vary” includes cold weather as well as hard acceleration and ...

A new discovery could let scientists artificially create crude oil in under an hour, accelerating a natural process that normally takes at least a few million years to complete. In nature, crude oil is the product of hundreds of species of algae and bacteria that grew, died, and slowly settled to form deposits of decaying organic matter. This matter builds ...

A 20-year-old mastermind from Romania has built the world’s first full-size Lego car, with a compressed air-powered Lego engine. It has space for two passengers and can hit a top speed of around 30 kph (18.6 mph). At this point, you should probably watch the rather awesome video, embedded below. Dubbed the Super Awesome Micro Project, the Lego car was ...

Security researchers have successfully broken one of the most secure encryption algorithms, 4096-bit RSA, by listening – yes, with a microphone — to a computer as it decrypts some encrypted data. The attack is fairly simple and can be carried out with rudimentary hardware. The repercussions for the average computer user are minimal, but if you’re a secret agent, power user, ...

There’s no driver at the wheel of the Ford F-150 I’m riding in and no orientation landmarks on the vast asphalt flatlands of Ford’s proving grounds. Yet time and again the truck circles and cuts the same arc which guides it precisely to and across two jarring strips of bumps that bounce me around in the back seat. I am ...

Photosynthesis is the engine of life. The synthesis of organic compounds made possible by coupling light to the splitting of water is probably the most important set of chemical reactions on the planet. While there are hopes of one day channeling photosynthetic outputs directly to our needs, many key details of the process, including the actual efficiency, are still incompletely ...

Water flows freely on the surface of Mars. Wait, what? In recent months, NASA’s Curiosity rover has confirmed that Mars, millions of years ago, used to be covered in free-flowing rivers. According to some new imagery from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and analysis by Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, however, it appears that water still flows on the ...

Sometimes movie executives make decisions so obviously bone-headed, it leaves one wondering if these people consult actual humans before making product decisions. In this case, Disney has decided to yank certain movies off the shelf right in time for Christmas. If the House of Mouse was simply opting not to sell movies digitally, that would be one thing. What it’s ...

Google, the search engine and advertising company, has acquired Boston Dynamics — the robotics and engineering company famous for the creation of some of the world’s most advanced robots, including BigDog, Cheetah, Petman, and Atlas. This brings Google’s total number of robot-related acquisitions to eight, and the company now has teams of robotics experts in California and Japan. As we’ve ...