Jaya Jiwatram

Imagine flying an airplane, watching a television or using a laptop computer made, at least in part, from a paper 500 times stronger and 10 times lighter than steel. It's no ordinary paper; it's "buckypaper"—a nanotechnology material that looks like carbon paper and is made out of tube-shaped carbon molecules 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. The material's strength, however, comes when it's stacked and pressed together to form a composite, giving it the ability to conduct electricity like copper and disperse heat like steel.

The robot maid Rosie from The Jetsons may seem old school, but the concept is far from it—or so South Korean researchers have affirmed this week after revealing their humanoid robot "Mahru." You may recall a few other robots that have made the limelight—most recently Japan's Robogirl, which looks eerily human—but Mahru, developed at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) as part of a state-funded $200,000 project, is a notch above the rest.

Cycle-rickshaws in New Delhi are getting a green makeover. This month, the state-run Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research unveiled what they call a "soleckshaw" (short for solar electric rickshaw). The soleckshaw, which like traditional cycle-rickshaws can still be pedaled, is a motorized cycle-rickshaw that runs on a 36-volt solar battery for up to 9.3 miles per hour, and carries a load of up to approximately 440 lbs. The battery has enough juice to get the rickshaw going for 30 to 42 miles.

In the worst of times, don't expect the best in everyone. Scammers are reveling in the financial turmoil by taking advantage of consumers' fears, especially those who are customers of banks most affected by the Wall Street crisis. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which issued a warning this week, cautioned that people should watch out for e-mails or pop-ups, even if from their own banks, asking for any sensitive personal or financial information. People should double-check their bank and credit card statements for fraudulent activity, the report added.

Our future may be uncertain, but leading geneticist Steve Jones at the University of College London says he knows one thing for sure: we're not going to change much on the evolutionary ladder. That's because human evolution is coming to a standstill, he claims. Jones says that the three main drivers behind evolution—natural selection, genetic mutation and randomness—don't hold as much anymore in the survival of the fittest race.

As human populations grow, pollution soils the environment and infrastructure develops, our natural habitat suffers. This may sound familiar, but scientists sent a resounding message today when they announced in a comprehensive five-year global wildlife review that these human-based causes and more are threatening one in four of the world's 5,487 known mammal species and have put 188 species in the critically endangered category.

Soon tracking your carbon footprint will require nothing more than a software installation on your cell phone. Developed at start-up company Carbon Hero in London, the software Carbon Diem takes advantage of global positioning satellites (GPS) to figure out automatically what transportation you are using, and, based on that deduction, calculate your up-to-the-minute carbon impact.

What makes an eco-friendly meal? It's a question that has caused many heated arguments. Some say vegetarian, or even vegan, meals are the best way to lead a green lifestyle, since the livestock industry causes a plethora of environmental problems, from massive-scale deforestation to air and water pollution. Others argue that the large-scale production of corn and soy (a popular substitute for meat products) are just as bad for the environment.

In Australia, the debate has taken an interesting turn.

It looks like the father of modern physics had more up his sleeve than the theory of relativity. Long after he changed the landscape of modern physics, Albert Einstein and his former student Leo Szilard patented a refrigerator that had no moving parts and used only pressurized gases for cooling. It got overshadowed 20 years later, in the 1950s, when more efficient, if environmentally-damaging, freon-compressors for refrigerators became available.

The next time you take a trip to the water cooler, just think, what you're about to drink isn't just good for hydration; it makes for a very effective, energy-efficient lens, too. That's what researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have announced after designing and testing an adaptive liquid lens—comprised of a pair of water droplets—that captures 250 pictures per second.

By some definitions, "Web 3.0" will be characterized by semantic mapping of data. Unlike regular searches which mine information based on keywords you type in, semantic search looks for information you want by connecting the meaning of words. Say, for example, you type in the word "cold." The way search engines like Google and Yahoo run now, you would get results based on the word alone. But "cold," like many words in the English language, is ambiguous and could mean anything from your health to the temperature.

Sometimes the smallest discovery lends itself to the biggest insight. That certainly was the case for University of Texas at Austin graduate student Christian Rabeling, who found a new ant species in the Amazon that is likely the descendent of one of the first ants to evolve on Earth more than 120 million years ago.

Food for thought: Your brain is wired to consider various possible meanings for a word before you've even heard the final sound of a word uttered. It's a conclusion scientists at the University of Rochester reached and also proved for the first time using a functional MRI (fMRI)—a tool for brain imaging—to see split-second activity. In the past, scientists postulated that listeners could only follow up to five syllables per second in spoken language by drawing from a small subset of words already known by the listener.

It's a well-accepted notion that if you want to master multiple languages, you should learn them at a young age. But new research reveals that learning young can have some serious downsides. According to a study released this week in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, children who are bilingual before age five have a higher chance of developing a stutter than those who learned only one language.

Mammoths are making a mighty big comeback. Last week, there was a stir among scientists when a controversial DNA-based study came out claiming that woolly mammoths have their roots exclusively in North America, since it has long been believed that they roamed from Western Europe to North America. Although the study is still raising eyebrows, many heads have turned to the gigantic discovery in Southern France's Auvergne region of a rare fossilized steppe mammoth skull weighing 1,300 pounds.