jaya Jiwatram

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!"

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.

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.

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.