Anna Maria Jakubek

LEMV: Not Your Father's Blimp:  Lockheed Martin

The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), as it's called, will be 250 feet long, autonomous, and able to float at up to 20,000 feet for an impressive three weeks at a time. As for its surveillance capabilities, a 40-foot-long stretch behind the cockpit will house a selection of spy gear, including a motion sensor and radar.

The idea of extraterrestrial boating comes from planetary geologist (and sailing enthusiast) Ellen Stofan, who points out that one of Saturn's moons, Titan, is covered with lakes, and in fact is one of only two places in our solar system known to have surface liquid (the other being Earth, of course). So why not launch a floating probe? After all, to date all extraterrestrial endeavors have involved either flight or land navigation, so perhaps it's time to switch it up a little.

To anyone who's ever pondered what urine looks like in space -- c'mon, don't be shy -- we say: wonder no more, because photos of the phenomenon have finally hit the internet.

Last Wednesday, a number of skygazers were lucky to sight a mysterious flare in the night sky, that, as it now turns out, was a 150-pound cocktail of astronaut urine and waste water released from the shuttle Discovery.

Unless you are this woman, you probably have a long mental list of moments and facts you wish you could remember -- but for the life of you, you can't. To use a personal example, I periodically Google the words "yellow house Berlin," hoping to produce the name of that one hostel I lived in for a summer in college; alas, no success yet.

In what could very well become the auto industry’s greatest comeback story, a trio of German companies is hoping to introduce a revamped version of the pride of DDR auto engineering: the Soviet-era Trabant.

According to the prototype the three companies plan to unveil at this year's Frankfurt Motor Show, the Trabant nT (as in Neu Trabant!) will be powered by an all-electric drive train, sport solar panels on the roof for juicing the AC and have a range of up to 150 miles.

This may come as a surprise to some (myself included), but despite the current ubiquity of texting, there’s still at least one place that won’t accept your texts: your local 911 center. Unless you live in Black Hawk County in Waterloo, Iowa, that is. Starting this week, the county’s emergency call center will be the first 911 center in the country to accept text messages sent to 911 in lieu of a phone call.

Brain cancer is a classic double whammy: the extremely invasive form of cancer is both deadly and difficult to treat. Fortunately, there's a promising solution on the table: tumor painting.

Because brain cancer tends to invade surrounding healthy brain tissue, it blurs the line between tumor and non-tumor tissue, and makes it difficult for surgeons to circumvent the healthy parts of the brain when they saw away at the tumor. On top of that, current imaging techniques produce fairly imprecise representations of the tissue, which only compounds the problem.

If you like beer, then perk up those ears, for we have news of an innovation – brought to you by, who else, the Germans – that could lead to longer-lasting brews. The development in question is a polymer that extracts riboflavin, a micronutrient found throughout beer and other beverages that promotes spoilage when exposed to light.

Robots are just like us: some become cooks, others go into sports, some intern for a while, and then there are the ones who find their calling in civic duty. Included in this last group are members of the recently unveiled London robotic firefighting team.

Awwwww:  University of Rochester

The next time someone tries to argue that all M&Ms are the same, no matter the color, you can tell them about the blue M&M. The candy (like Gatorade and other products) gets its color from a food dye similar to Brilliant Blue G (BBG) -- a compound that, as it turns out, is medically useful. Building on earlier research, scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center have found that injections of BBG can relieve mice of secondary spinal cord injuries. In September, they will start conducting human clinical trials.