Stuart Fox

For people confined to wheelchairs, the proliferation of ramps has greatly enhanced their mobility. Unfortunately, opening doors remains an omnipresent, and frustrating, challenge. Oddly enough, opening doors also presents a serious impediment for anthropomorphic robots. Now, robotics engineer Erin Rapacki has solved both problems with a single stroke.

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Since budget cuts and the inability to overcome problems like boredom and high radiation doses have ruled out any manned mission to Mars in the foreseeable future, NASA has shifted gears back towards a program of robotic exploration. To that end, NASA now wants a rocket-powered UAV to fly around the Red Planet, photographing the surface.

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After 14 years of work and $5.5 billion, the LHC has survived faulty magnets, avian sabotage, and the threat of malevolent time travelers to finally collided its first particles.

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With its annual output of over 330 million tons a year feeding animals, running cars, and decorating South Dakota tourist attractions, maize is clearly Americas most important crop. That's why the newly published complete corn genome could drastically change the food, automotive and plastic industries.

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Of the remaining mysteries surrounding the Watergate break-in, none confound conspiracy buffs more than the 18 and a half minutes of tape deleted from the June 20th, 1972 meeting in the Oval Office. Now, after 37 years and several forensic analyses of the audio tape itself, the National Archives will turn its attention to the only physical notes taken during that meeting in the hope of extracting more information about the famous recording gap.

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The perils of space flight number in the hundreds, from radiation exposure to the impact of micro-asteroids. But for astronauts who spend an extended amount of time floating weightlessly in the near-endless void of space, muscle atrophy remains the most common health problem. Thankfully, a shipment of RNA-treated worms may help scientists on the International Space Station solve that issue.

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We've all been there, angrily jabbing the remote control at the cable box in a futile attempt to change the channel. When remote control batteries die, my sanity often follows closely behind. Well, soon that will be a problem as quaint as running out of whale oil for a lantern, thanks to a new remote control that charges itself with the energy from its buttons.

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Star Trek introduced the world to a wide range of fictional technology, most of which, like beaming or warp drive, will likely remain fiction. However, a team of scientists from the University of Canada has taken the phaser, the show's famous stun-laser, out of the TV and into reality. Unfortunately, right now it only works on worms.

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Counterfeiting is as old as money itself, with the history of currency including a millennia-long arms race between mints and the forgers that copy them. While governments have finally crafted paper money so intricate that counterfeiting isn't a major problem, detecting counterfeit coins remains a challenge. Now, Spanish scientists have modified a regular optical computer mouse to create a cheap and easy device for sniffing out phony Euro coins.

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