Greg Mone

After 20 years of development, problems with funding, lawsuits, and an arduous 25-mile journey to cart its key parts uphill, the $102 million Large Binocular Telescope is finally complete. The telescope, an internationally-run observatory that points skyward from a mountaintop in southern Arizona, has already captured some beautiful images, including the spiral galaxy pictured to the left, which is 102 million light years away from Earth.

The most prolific car manufacturer on the planet resides in a Rice University laboratory in Houston, where chemist James Tour and his colleagues have built one trillion trillion nanoscopic cars. The tiny four-wheeled vehicles are only four billionths of a meter wide-25,000 of them parked side by side would be about as thick as a piece of paper. Not just another nano-gimmick, Tour´s cars could one day carve tiny channels in silicon, creating more-powerful computer chips.

This January, news that South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk fabricated research on cloned human stem cells brought more negative attention to an already controversial field. Hwang´s work had been believed to be a breakthrough. His technique for cloning embryonic stem cells genetically matched to patients might have been used by scientists worldwide to cure disease.