Gregory Mone

A racing team led by 66-year-old Ed Shadle is gunning for the world land speed record of 763 miles per hour—their goal is to break the 800 mark. Shadle has spent a decade and $150,000 getting ready, and transforming an old jet into his potentially record-smashing ride, the North American Eagle. The car boasts 42,000 horsepower, and will supposedly do 0 to 800 in just 20 seconds. And it's entirely green, running on solar . . . no, just kidding.

The big news, though, is that Shadle is looking for drivers.

Italians have better coffee, better food, shorter workdays. And now their iPhones are going to be cooler than ours, too? That's unfair. But according to La Repubblica, a daily newspaper in Rome, Telecom Italia has signed a non-exclusive deal to distribute a new, 3G-compatible iPhone. It will be unlocked, and won't come with a two-year contract.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are developing child-sized, wheeled robots that could soon start helping elderly people in their homes. Computer scientist Rod Grupen, who led the team that developed uBot-5, notes that robots are finally safe and inexpensive enough to perform a real function in homes. The robot has an LCD screen, a webcam, and a wireless connection to the Internet. It speeds around and balances on two Segway-like wheels. If it does happen to fall, though, uBot-5 uses its long arms to do a push-up, and return itself to an upright position.

In 2007, registrations of new hybrid vehicles jumped by 38 percent to 350,289 vehicles, according to a new report from R.L. Polk & Company. Gee, I wonder why? Maybe it's got something to do with rising prices at the pump, or climate change. Or maybe there's something bigger at play.

A German newspaper reported last week that 13-year-old Nico Marquardt corrected a few glitches in NASA's estimates regarding the chances of a certain asteroid colliding with Earth. NASA concluded that the Apophis space rock has only a 1 in 45,000 chance of knocking into us, but this school-kid announced that the space agency had missed a few zeros, suggesting that the probability is closer to 1 in 450. And while quite a few news reports backed him up, even claiming that NASA agreed Marquardt was correct, the space agency is sticking to its estimates.

Spending a little too much time on the Web? Now there are a few movements afoot to encourage the tech-obsessed to take vacations from connectivity. Here's Ariel Meadow Stallings, a blogger and Microsoft part-timer, on realizing that she'd become a little too hooked:

"I love technology. I'm not a Luddite. But I realized it was a problem when I would sit down to check my email and it was almost like I would wake up six hours later and find I was watching videos of puppies on YouTube . . . I'd try and think what I had been doing for the past two hours and I had no idea. I associate that kind of time loss with blackouts when you're drunk."

A radar device aboard ESA's Mars Express orbiter has allowed scientists to peek beneath the surface from afar, and the success with this research is now prompting them to think up other spots in the solar system that would be ideal for this sort of examination.

As many as 320,000 U.S. troops may have sustained brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet less than half of them were evaluated by doctors. But now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Pentagon is funding a project to develop a device that would do on-site testing for brain trauma, and be tough enough to hold up in a war zone.

The gadget, which is being developed by neurosurgeon Jamshid Ghajar and his team at Weill Cornell Medical College, will use eye-tracking technology to measure the brain's health.

Fortune has an interesting profile of Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, who has persisted, and seen his company grow, through the ups and downs of the dot-com economy. Presently he's worth around $8 billion, which isn't too bad. In addition to recounting his rise to prominence, the piece also details his plans to transform Amazon into the Web's biggest retailer of digital media. Hence Amazon's e-book reader, the Kindle, and the company's push into the MP3 space, where it's trying to unseat Apple as emperor. Apparently this is a pretty heated competition: According to the Fortune piece, he refuses to use the word "Apple."

It packs 4 million times more material than our sun, but relative to the black holes sitting at the center of some neighboring galaxies, it actually doesn't do all that much. The fact that this black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, kicks out billions of times less energy than others of its kind has made it something of a mystery. But now a team of scientists at Kyoto University suggests that Sagittarius A* may be resting after a far more active period a few centuries ago.

Hoping to bring a final end to the era of the exploding notebook, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC in Germany are developing batteries without flammable materials.

The liquid electrolytes at the heart of traditional lithium-ion batteries can catch fire, but the Fraunhofer scientists say they've figured out a way to make them with a new, solid polymer that's inflammable, and, since it's solid, won't leak.

When we spoke with Peter Segal—director of the upcoming film Get Smart—for our Sci-Tech Summer Movie Guide, he knew straight off that he had to play up the technology in the comedic spy caper. "We knew getting into this that the gadgets are really important," he says. He couldn't tell us about all the tech tools in the film, but there's a clever update of the infamous "cone of silence," and the movie features exploding cuff links and dental floss, plus a tooth radio.

Setting a spacecraft down on Mars isn't exactly easy—just ask Beagle 2. NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, en route and due for a May 25 rendezvous with the surface, recently received a course adjustment from mission planners as they try to ensure that the craft doesn't drop down in a danger zone.

MIT researchers have proposed a strange new way to predict the severity of a hurricane: Listening underwater. Currently, the most common way to gauge a storm's strength is to either study satellite images (which can be pretty inaccurate), or fly a weather plane straight on into the storm and gather critical data (which gets expensive).

No, you can't hike or spelunk or even tunnel down to the center of the Earth, even if movies like The Core or this summer's 3D adventure flick, Journey to the Center of the Earth, suggest otherwise. To find out about our planet's insides, scientists rely on very different tricks. And, apparently, a little luck.