• Technology

    The Return of the Blimp

    By Paul Adams Posted on 7.10.2008 11 Comments

    Mammoth-sized blimps may work well as advertising tools, but soon they could be doing a lot more work than that. Aerospace and defense corporation Boeing and Canadian company SkyHook International are working together to create a 302-foot-long airship with rotors that can haul heavy loads—double the capacity of the biggest helicopter—across remote regions at a lower fuel and environmental cost.

  • Science

    Nuking Stowaways

    By Abby Seiff Posted on 7.11.2008 5 Comments

    Transoceanic freighters haul 80 percent of the world’s commercial goods. But those boats inadvertently carry destructive cargo as well. An empty ship can suck up more than 10 million gallons of water to stay balanced as it crosses the open ocean. Upon its arrival into another port, the crew pumps the ballast water and any small animals or plants living in that water—sometimes thousands of organisms per gallon—into foreign harbors, where they invade and damage local ecosystems.

  • The Environment

    Bad for People, Great for Plants

    By Abby Seiff Posted on 7.9.2008 12 Comments

    Tell me this isn’t a summer blockbuster—as man faces the catastrophic effects of increased carbon dioxide levels, plants flourish. German researchers from the Thuenen Institute confirmed as much Tuesday, when they released findings showing that crop yields boom when plants are exposed to high levels of CO2. Jets sprayed the plants with extra CO2—enough to match the amount that scientists predict will fill the atmosphere by 2050—and the outputs of barley, beets and wheat jumped 10 percent.

  • Gadgets

    The Computer that Reads Hand Signals

    By Abby Seiff Posted on 6.16.2008 7 Comments

    You don’t have to fumble with a remote control to pause a video on Toshiba’s Qosmio G55-Q802. Simply hold your palm up in the universal “stop” sign. The laptop reads this and other hand signals instantly using the Cell, the supercomputer chip best known for powering the PlayStation 3. An Intel CPU performs most of the tasks on the G55, but a special version of the Cell tackles complex video-manipulation jobs by breaking them into bite-size chunks and parceling them out to four processors on the chip.



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December 2009: Best of What's New

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