Long lines at store checkouts could be history if a new technology created in part at Rice University comes to pass. Rice researchers, in collaboration with a team led by Gyou-jin Cho at Sunchon National University in Korea, have come up with an inexpensive, printable transmitter that can be invisibly... » read this article

University students have always been known for their activism, but I just met a group at Columbia University's School of Public Administration (SIPA) who are using technology to take it to a new level. They are volunteers who have been holed up in the basement of the school's library, despite... » read this article

For years, man has been trying to build a jetpack which would actually be safe and cheap enough to use by anyone other than Lee Majors on the title sequence of The Fall Guy. It turns out that we’ve been doing it wrong. Instead of starting with a pack and... » read this article

Editor's note: Whether or not the Bloom Box is technically viable - who's to say? But we do note one element of Stahl's report - the complications imposed by capitalism, competition, patents, etc., on getting innovative ideas like Sridhar's to market. The last thing the venture capitalists and corporations like... » read this article

Scientists have deciphered the genetic blueprint of South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu and an indigenous Bushman from Namibia as part of an ambitious and controversial project to bring modern genomic medicine to the developing world. An international team of researchers decoded every gene of the Nobel Prize-winning anti-apartheid leader and... » read this article

As record snowfall crippled the mid-Atlantic this week, many Republicans used the blizzard-like conditions to argue that global warming is a hoax. We speak to climate scientist Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who argues the extreme weather is in fact a part of global warming. //... » read this article

TED.com Paul Stamets' Webpage Mycelium Running- How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World... » read this article

In the first Superman movie, supervillain Lex Luthor plans to trigger a massive, California-detaching earthquake by detonating a couple of nuclear weapons in the San Andreas Fault. Crazy Lex! That scheme never would have worked, geologists will tell you. But, if he’d been serious about creating an earthquake, there are... » read this article

Despite cool temperatures over most of the Arctic Ocean in January, Arctic sea ice extent continued to track below normal. By the end of January, ice extent dropped below the extent observed in January 2007. Ice extent was unusually low in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic, the one major... » read this article

Since mid-January, hardly a day has gone by without some report in the big-business-controlled media about China and censorship of the Internet. The primary reports were about Google’s declaration in early January that it may stop complying with Chinese laws that are meant to block illegal Internet activity, including spying.... » read this article

The less you use your brain's frontal lobes, the more you see yourself through rose-colored glasses, a University of Texas at Austin researcher says. Those findings are being published in the February edition of the journal NeuroImage. "In healthy people, the more you activate a portion of your frontal lobes,... » read this article

Asteroid watchers are buzzing about a small object called 2010 AL30. First spotted on Sunday, it will speed past the Earth at midday London time on Wednesday, missing the planet by a mere 125,000 kilometres, just a third of the distance to the moon. Astronomers had just two days' warning... » read this article

Scientists have successfully tested a system that translates brain waves into speech, raising the prospect that people left mute by stroke, Lou Gehrig's disease and other afflictions will one day be able to communicate by synthetic voice. The system was tested on a 26-year-old man left paralyzed by a brain... » read this article

Don't expect cayenne in Copenhagen, say Cornell biologists who demonstrated cultural coevolution of antimicrobial spice use with food-spoilage microbes in torrid climates "Garlic, onion, allspice and oregano, for example, were found to be the best all-around bacteria killers (they kill everything), followed by thyme, cinnamon, tarragon and cumin (any of... » read this article

Happy Holidays from TecsChange! At TecsChange we never know what our next opportunity will be.  This year took another unexpected turn.  Previously we have gotten a few scattered laptop donations.  They were never the same so we couldn’t use any of our mass production tricks to clean of and restore... » read this article

The promotional material from Big Green Energy, aka Biomass Gas & Electric, presents biomass as “clean, renewable energy”, sustainable and green. The U.S. Department of Energy uses the terms “clean and renewable” when introducing visitors at its website to the topic. But is it accurate to describe the repeated removal... » read this article

Earth's north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) a year due to magnetic changes in the planet's core, new research says. The core is too deep for scientists to directly detect its magnetic field. But researchers can infer the field's movements by tracking how... » read this article

Editor's Note: “Poison on the Platter”, is an eye-opening film, made by Mahesh Bhatt and Ajay Kanchan, illustrating how all of our lives are going to be (adversely) affected by genetically modified foods. It is no longer a farmer’s issue alone. It's a matter of the consumers’ right to food safety. For... » read this article

Editor's Note: After seeing what the U.S. government has done to civil liberties at home and the control of news and opinion in the corporate media, do you trust their new designs for your internet? “Our pursuit of cybersecurity will not include — I repeat, will not include — monitoring... » read this article

Scientists have unlocked the entire genetic code of two of the most common cancers - skin and lung - a move they say could revolutionise cancer care. Not only will the cancer maps pave the way for blood tests to spot tumours far earlier, they will also yield new drug... » read this article