Jaya Jiwatram

In New York it's hard to escape the billowing exhaust fumes emanating from vehicles, the cacophonous sounds of honking taxi cabs, the stench of garbage piled along narrow streets, or even the dingy rats that carelessly scuttle along the gritty underground railway tracks.

So, it's even harder to imagine that come 2012, the Big Apple could be a hot spot for an eco-friendly vacation. And, yet, it may very well be, because that's when the city hopes to complete its transformation of the southern half of Governors Island into a 40-acre sustainable, eco-friendly park.

An environmental study reports that polarized light from surfaces, such as asphalt and glass buildings, is adversely affecting wildlife behavior.

Call it the "green" team or even the "dream" team, but what environmentalists can now say with affirmation is that change really is here. President-elect Barack Obama's picks for his administration's green team are among the best and brightest scientists and advocates of environmental change.

Brainiacs now have something besides their intelligence to celebrate; their sperm. The intellectually endowed produce better quality and more mobile sperm, according to a study published in Intelligence and led by Rosalind Arden of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College in England.

When your mother says eat your greens, you just might want to listen. It's been known since the 1970's that cruciferous vegetables, or cabbage family vegetables, such as broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kale, have anti-cancer benefits. But researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who have studied the benefits of anti-cancer vegetables for 15 years, are the first to explain how an anti-cancer compound, indole-3-carbinol (I3C), found in broccoli and cabbage, works to slow down the activity of an enzyme linked to rapidly developing breast cancer.

Long gone are the days when woolly mammoths roamed the icy North American and Eurasian turf 10,000 years ago. But in the labs of Penn State University they have been resurrected—well, almost.

While you won't see a shaggy, 12-feet-tall mammoth brought back from the dead any time soon (unlike the 16-year-old frozen mice earlier this month), scientists at Penn State are the first to decode almost the entire DNA set of the now extinct species of elephant.

Trash is a stinky topic. With 130 million tons of it hitting landfills annually, it is the nation's largest human-caused producer of methane gas. And now, residents in Florida's St. Lucie County are turning that stench to gold. Or at least to gas. The county has paired up with Atlanta-based company Geoplasma to implement a plasma gasification plant.

Researchers reveal that a 1.2 million-year-old female pelvis they found in Ethiopia in 2001 suggests our predecessors were larger-brained than previously thought

The story of evolution got bigger last week when researchers revealed in the journal Science that they had discovered a wide-hipped pelvis, suggesting our ancestors were larger-brained than formerly thought. The first of its kind, the 1.2 million-year-old, near-complete female pelvis is from the now-extinct Homo erectus species, believed to be our first human-like relative to leave Africa.

Tequila may be just another drink to those out in the town, but to a team of scientists in Mexico their country's native alcohol turned out to be a gem; a diamond, to be precise. Javier Morales, Luis Apátiga and Victor Castaño at the National Autonomous University of Mexico made the alchemist-worthy discovery while experimenting turning various organic solutions, such as acetone and ethanol, into diamonds. The scientists noted that 80-proof tequila (40 percent alcohol) had the ideal proportion of ethanol to water to create diamond films.

He is greenish brown, has dragon scales for skin, grows up to 32 inches and is the world's last remaining lizard-like reptile that has a lineage dating back to about 225 million years when dinosaurs still roamed the earth—he's a tuatara and he's making a comeback. A species native to New Zealand, the tuatara was spotted nesting in a sanctuary close to Wellington last week, the first such sighting in 200 years. Staff at the 620-acre Karori Wildlife Sanctuary stumbled upon four white, leathery ping-pong sized tuatara eggs during routine maintenance work at the end of last week.

Tired of missing your favorite sports because you're stuck in a meeting? Those woes may soon be a thing of the past. A team of researchers at Umeå University and Ericsson Research in Sweden have developed a technology synchronizing a cell phone's vibrations to a ball's movement in a field. The vibrotactile tool is designed so that a phone vibrates at different frequencies and lengths depending on where the ball is on the field, which team is kicking the ball and when a goal is being scored. A ball in midfield, for example, produces a light, short vibration, while a ball that makes it past a goalkeeper sets off a stronger and longer vibration meant to signify "Goooooooooooooal!"

Your phone rings. But when you pick up, you don't recognize your mother's voice on the other end. It's not amnesia, but phonagnosia -- the inability to recognize voices. If you've never heard of it, that's because it's a very rare condition that usually occurs after a stroke, as a result of lesions in the right hemisphere of the brain. This week, however, scientists at University College London (UCL) reported the first known case of a woman born with phonagnosia in the online journal Neuropsychologia.

Hackers may be one step ahead of you once again. Sure, you can follow all the steps to protect your private data, like creating a password that's hard to guess or clearing your memory cache after browsing, but that may not be enough. It's very possible that hackers can sniff out your data with every keystroke—at least that's what Swiss researchers proved in a video demonstration, which showed four different ways to pick up sensitive information from people's keyboards as they typed.

Want to eat yourself thin? Cool your jets. According to research published in the British Medical Journal this week, those who wolf down their food and eat until they're stuffed are three times more likely to be overweight.

If earwigs, centipedes or spiders give you the creepy crawlies, quit while you're ahead. Otherwise, meet "Chan's megastick" (Phobaeticus chani). Recently named the world's longest living insect, the thin, bamboo-looking stick insect—best known for its camouflaging abilities to deter predators—was discovered in Southeast Asia's island of Borneo.