Seth Fletcher

Global financial apocalypse be damned – the Rocket Racing League is investing in the space tourism business. Yes, the timing is a little strange, but today the RRL announced a partnership with the New Mexico state government and Armadillo Aerospace — the rocket engine company founded by Doom creator John Carmack that will also supply engines for the Rocket Racing League’s eponymous, um, racing league — to fly suborbital tourist flights from a spaceport outside Las Cruces.

[ Read Full Story ]

Today, after a nearly two-year tease, General Motors unveiled the final design for the car that it hopes will save the company: the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, the world's first production plug-in hybrid. The Volt is designed to drive 40 miles on a single charge of its giant lithium-ion battery; after that, an onboard 1.4-liter four-cylinder flex-fuel engine kicks in to power the electric motors that drive the car. GM will most likely make 10,000 of the cars in the first year of production; it's expected to go on sale in November 2010.

[ Read Full Story ]

Health risks for the 21st century worker keep getting weirder. Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that quantum dots—nanoparticles made of semiconducting crystals that emit light when stimulated at certain wavelengths—can penetrate skin through abrasions.

[ Read Full Story ]

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 Teslas 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.

[ Read Full Story ]

Dont 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 summers 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.

[ Read Full Story ]

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.

[ Read Full Story ]

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/autos/When_Automotive_Design_Goes_Bad;
Later well be posting a gallery of the most attractive, noteworthy, and technologically advanced cars from this years 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.

[ Read Full Story ]

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).

[ Read Full Story ]

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.

[ Read Full Story ]

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?

[ Read Full Story ]