Clay Dillow

Adding a new wrinkle to the 'droid versus iPhone debate, a project at Keio University in Tokyo have created iPhone software specifically designed to control androids. More specifically, they've created an interface that puts control of a humanoid robot right at your fingertips.

Having one of those days where even a hearty bowl of Fruit Loops and Jack Daniels can't get you out of bed? A telepresence robot can come into the office for you, elevating telecommuting to a decidedly new level. The somewhat humanoid 'bots, produced by Mountain View, California-based Anybots, are controlled via video-game-like controls from your laptop, allowing you to be "present" without actually being in the office.

Server farms are undeniably awesome in that they store huge pools of data, enable such modern phenomena as cloud computing and Web-hosted email, and most importantly, make the Internet as it stands today possible. The downside: data centers get very, very hot. Cooling huge banks of servers doesn't just cost a lot, it eats up a lot of energy, and that generally means fossil fuels.

News from high in the Chilean Andes this morning: the ALMA observatory in Chile, the largest, most ambitious ground-based astronomy tool ever created, made its first measurements today from its overlook 17,400 above sea level. The interferometric measurements of radio signals, or "fringes," from a distant quasar at sub-millimeter wavelengths prove that ALMA isn't just hype, boasting unprecedented sensitivity and resolution.

And that's using just two of the eventual 66 antennas making up the array.

While the rest of the Web-savvy world fawns over breakthroughs in real-time search and pontificates on the future of social networking, Los Alamos National Labs is looking to the past. A team there is developing a "time traveling" Web browsing technology, dubbed Memento, that will allow users to find old versions of Web pages without trolling old archives.

Algae get a lot of airtime as a possible future source of biofuels to wean us from dirty fossil fuels, but even biofuels don't go so far as to eliminate hydrocarbons (and their constituent carbon emissions) from our energy diet. But a different use for algae could prove a better solution to the future of fuel.

A new process that produces clean, sustainable hydrogen from photosynthesis in algae could change all that. The means of manufacturing clean, usable hydrogen has heretofore required a high-energy process that drastically dilutes the upside.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is off to deliver a fresh crew, as well as about 30,000 pounds of equipment, to the International Space Station today as part of an 11-day mission that will also involve three space-walks. The mission will warehouse equipment too big for Russian, Japanese or European crafts to carry in what will be last launch of the year, with six slated for 2010 before the Shuttle is officially scrapped. Catch a live feed of the launch below.

Fluid dynamics generally lends itself to the study of fluids themselves, but by revisiting the theories of an 18th-century scientist, researchers have found that studying invisible barriers that form between moving fluids may be far more enlightening than studying the actual fluids. Governing the movements of everything from the oceans to the air flow over a wing, so-called Lagrangian coherent structures are the “skeletons of the sea and air,” and are changing the way scientists understand and apply fluid dynamics, according to a report in the Economist.