While the Smart Grid we needed years ago is still years away, the Obama administration took a step forward today as Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced $620 million in stimulus awards for 32 Smart Grid demonstration projects benefiting 21 states. A decidedly feel-good video that is nonetheless educational was released along with the announcement and explains (in broad terms at least) what the DOE aims to achieve with its Smart Grid investment. View it after the jump.

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For people confined to wheelchairs, the proliferation of ramps has greatly enhanced their mobility. Unfortunately, opening doors remains an omnipresent, and frustrating, challenge. Oddly enough, opening doors also presents a serious impediment for anthropomorphic robots. Now, robotics engineer Erin Rapacki has solved both problems with a single stroke.

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Roadside bombings are, unfortunately, a part of daily life for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and almost every day the military captures surveillance footage of improvised explosive devices being set and detonated. Rather than letting the footage languish, a joint team of counter-IED experts is quickly flipping the footage into video game-like simulations that make training drills as versatile and flexible as the troops themselves.

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Who you gonna call when a normally placid pachyderm decides to act out? Enter Zachariah Matthew, a Mumbai engineer who created a remote-controlled immobilizing device to handle elephants on a rampage.

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Cue the Aerosmith soundtrack; a plan to send a manned space mission to land on an asteroid is gaining traction within both NASA and the aerospace industry as experts look to bridge the feasibility gap between lunar missions and an eventual rendezvous with Mars. Of course, no party is ruling out the possibility of an Armageddon-esque trip to a Near Earth Object (NEO) on a harmful trajectory, should the need arise in the future.

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Since budget cuts and the inability to overcome problems like boredom and high radiation doses have ruled out any manned mission to Mars in the foreseeable future, NASA has shifted gears back towards a program of robotic exploration. To that end, NASA now wants a rocket-powered UAV to fly around the Red Planet, photographing the surface.

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Each day this week leading up to Black Friday, we'll excerpt a chunk of our new Tech Buyer's Guide here on the site to arm you with the skills and the picks to get the most from your weekend shopping madness. Here are our picks for pocket camcorders (hint: no Flip!) and our buying advice for camcorders in general. Check out the guide for our picks in full-feature camcorders, as well as 15 other product categories.

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Here at PopSci, we spend our fair share of time marveling at fantastic visions of the future. So as a result, we know better than anyone how fun it can be looking back a few decades at the visions that flew a bit too close to the sun. And that's what this new series, The Future Then Video (inspired by our magazine's back page), is all about--taking a look back at retro visions of the future and seeing how their predictions panned out.

In our first episode, we're looking at an amazing promotional film that Braniff International made in 1975 to get customers excited about supersonic air travel.

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When it comes to harnessing the energy potential of the oceans, the Norwegians have no problem starting small. The world's first osmotic power plant opened today in Tofte, Norway, utilizing the properties of salty seawater to generate a whopping 4 kilowatts of electricity for the grid, or about enough to power a coffee maker. But the Norwegian company running the project, Statkraft, is a glass-half-full kind of company, claiming that eventually osmotic plants could draw half of Europe's electricity from the saltiness of the sea.

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