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Sure, most Americans spent last weekend grilling meat, drinking beer and blowing thing up. But the pasty, lonely few that spent Forth of July weekend browsing the websites of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation noticed something terribly amiss. Those websites, along with 12 other US government websites along with numerous South Korean government sites were loading very, very slowly, and sometimes, not at all. The culprit? A massive distributed denial-of-service attack.

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Most of the Photoshop tools familiar to artists import old school analog devices onto the computer. Before computers, artists would use actual razors to crop, and physical scissors and glue to cut and paste. But South Korean designer Jinsun Park has envisioned a pen that reverses the process, taking a tool developed for the computer and porting it to physical reality.

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As unmanned drones become a larger part of how America makes war, fully autonomous fighting robots seem less a possibility than an eventuality. But how do we ensure that these future autonomous weapons conform to the ethics we would expect from a human combatant?

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There were a lot of heroes on and after 9/11, and as the the Kennel Club reminds us, not all of them were bipedal. Now, one of those courageous canines has been brought back to life through cloning.

Trakr, a German shepherd who assisted with search and rescue in the rubble of Ground Zero, died in April. However, Trakr's DNA was saved, and BioArts International produced five clones of the dog. Yesterday, the clones were presented to James Symington, the Canadian police officer who led Trakr through the wreckage of the World Trade Center.

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There was a time when a camera was its own thing. Now my phone's a camera, my computer's a camera, and it looks like pretty soon my pants could be a camera too. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a thread with bundles of photo-sensitive fiber optic cables inside. The cables transmit light back to a computer, effectively turning each thread into a camera.

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For everyone looking to hop the next commercial flight to space, your departure gate has finally been announced. Almost two years after the first plans were announced, construction has finally begun on Spaceport America. The spaceport, which will serve as the launch and landing pad for Virgin Galactic flights, is the first of its kind anywhere in the world, and represents the first serious commitment of infrastructure to manned commercial spaceflight.

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Bismuth Telluride Valley doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but a new discovery may mean the end of silicon chips. After decades of using Bi₂Te₃ for its thermoelectric properties, researchers have discovered new properties of the material that paves the way for bismuth telluride chips constructed to power quantum computers.

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For years, scientists have been talking about the future impact of global warming. Well, according to a new government report, the future is now. The report claims that heat waves have increased in the Northeast, droughts have increased in the Southwest, coastline has eroded, and adds that "global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced."

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Any gardener knows weeds are tough. You spray, them, you uproot them, but they keep coming back. Well, some scientists are looking to harness the resilience of weeds to fortify food crops against the causes and consequences of climate change.

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Stephen Hawking once theorized that black holes would emit a stream of electromagnetic radiation named, what else, Hawking Radiation. However, in the 35 years since Hawking made his prediction, no one has observed the phenomena. Now, a team of Israeli scientists are working on a way to make their own Hawking Radiation by creating an artificial black hole in their lab.

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