High drama in the electric car world: According to the New York Times, electric sports-car manufacturer Tesla is suing Henrik Fisker and Bernhard Koehler of Fisker Coachbuild, charging that Fisker “fraudulently” signed on to design Tesla’s “White Star” sedan, sabotaged the sedan project by doing substandard work, then stole confidential information and went on to build a competing car—the Fisker Karma.

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Don’t count the Rocket Racing League out just yet. After a lengthy delay and intimations of its demise, the league has finally announced exhibition flights. Pending FAA approval, a ten-minute flight will take place the first weekend of August at this summer’s EAA Airventure festival in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Granger Whitelaw made the announcement this morning at a press conference in New York, admitting that the news was coming some fifteen months later than he had hoped. “I will take full responsibility” for the delay, he said.

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Rip open a Pleo, get the run down on hybrids, and learn about the military's futuristic flying laser gun as Chuck Cage and the editors of PopSci take a behind-the-scenes tour of the third annual How it Works issue. Learn the stories behind the stories of some of the world's most sophisticated machines.

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Later we’ll be posting a gallery of the most attractive, noteworthy, and technologically advanced cars from this year’s New York International Auto Show (watch our auto show coverage page here). But for now, I present you with the most unfortunate piece of automotive design on the showroom floor: The Toyota Yaris Club Five Axis Design.

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Strange as it might seem, the Automotive X-Prize—which will award a $10 million prize to the team(s) that develop production-ready cars that get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon—wasn't official until this afternoon. But today at a press conference at the New York International Auto Show, X-Prize honcho Peter Diamandis fired the starting gun (see Diamandis talk about the competition in the video above).

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The long awaited Pontiac El Camino—I mean, the Pontiac G8 Sport Truck—arrived this morning at the New York Auto Show in what might be the most amusingly schizophrenic press conference in history.

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Fuel your stomach, then fuel your mind with this week's edition of Cocktail Party Science. Listen in as host Chuck Cage talks to writer Amanda Schaffer and PopSci editor Seth Fletcher about how E. coli could become the most alternative fuel of all.

Plus: Should pollution be a sin? How 'bout genetic engineering?

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The highest-endurance aircraft currently flying is Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk UAV, which can stay aloft for up to 40 hours. Now Darpa—which, to its credit, is never short on outlandish ideas—wants to beat that endurance record more than 1,000 times. The goal of Darpa's recently launched Vulture Program is to build a kind of atmospheric satellite that can stay aloft for five years at a time with little or no maintenance.

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As the Saab logo on the hood attests, this is not a Mini Cooper from the future. It's the Swedish automaker's latest concept car—a next-gen compact that runs on a 1.4 liter, E85-capable turbocharged engine paired with an electric hybrid system. It draws on Saab’s earlier Aero-X and 9X concepts, and follows on the heels of the Saab 9-4X BioPower crossover concept unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show in January.

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