From Popular Mechanics:
Crunch'n'Munch EATR will grab plants with its robotic arm, chop them with a mini chainsaw, and burn them in its onboard steam combustion engine to make power. Francis Govers III 
Oil shale is rock containing deposits of oil and is pictured here burning.
From Discovery Magazine:
From Science Daily:
Some college students listen to their iPods at volumes that may lead to hearing damage, according to a new study Credit: stockxpert
From Times Online:
Sky to compete with Apple's iTunes with 'Sky Songs' downloading service
Photo: The discovery of the brain cell which determines our sleep patterns could pave the way for the introduction of a pill to beat jetlag
Good for the brain (Image: Alex Segre/Rex Features)
From CNET:
From The BBC:
From San Francisco Chronicle:
Photo: This grainy image is a mug shot of Colton Harris-Moore, a.k.a. the "Barefoot Burglar." Although Harris-Moore has been described as a "feral child," there have been other documented cases of truly "wild" children throughout history. AP Photo/Island County Sheriff's Office via the Everette Herald 
Many fossils of young dinosaurs, including T. rex relatives (above, a computer-generated image of a young T. rex), have been misidentified as unique species, paleontologists said in October 2009. That means up to a third of all dinosaur species may have never existed, experts say. Photograph © NGC 
Image: Harris made the first definitive measurement of an electric current that flows continuously in tiny, but ordinary, metal rings. (Credit: Jack Harris/Yale University)
Researchers had a person walk around a square of 28 radio transceivers mounted on plastic pipes. The person creates shadows in the radio waves, resulting in the blob-like image (right). Credit: Sarang Joshi and Joey Wilson, University of Utah.
It isn't entirely clear why B. kiplingi is able to evade acacia ants, whose goal is to protect the shrub from attacks. Credit: Christopher Meehan
From Time Magazine:
From Times Online:
Luminous: The pale halo-shaped cloud was hovering over Moscow on Wednesday
From CNET:
From The BBC:
The Pointe-à -Callière Museum 
Preparation of a solution of sensor nanoparticles. (Credit: Image courtesy of Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)
From Christian Science Monitor:
Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberte smiles shortly after his landing with the members of the mission to the International space station, Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and NASA astronaut Michael Barratt, not seen, near the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Yuri Kochetkov, Pool)
Muon Chambers The Atlas Experiment 
Photo: Nanoparticles filled with nitric oxide
An electron microscope image shows an A H1N1 swine flu virus culture obtained from a California patient. (C. S. Goldsmith and A. Balish/Centers for Disease Control/Reuters)
A huge cloud of ash spewed from the Chaiten volcano, some 1,300 km south of Santiago when it erupted in 2008. Credit: AFP
The Singularity. The event when the rate of technological change becomes human-surpassing, just as the advent of human civilization a few millenia ago surpassed the comprehension of non-human creatures. So when will this event happen?
There is a great deal of speculation on the 'what' of the Singularity, whether it will create a utopia for humans, cause the extinction of humans, or some outcome in between. Versions of optimism (Star Trek) and pessimism (The Matrix, Terminator) all become fashionable at some point. No one can predict this reliably, because the very definition of the singularity itself precludes such prediction. Given the accelerating nature of technological change, it is just as hard to predict the world of 2050 from 2009, as it would have been to predict 2009 from, say, 1200 AD. So our topic today is not going to be about the 'what', but rather the 'when' of the Singularity.
Read more ....
Read more ....The debate over exactly when we will reach "peak oil" is irrelevant. No matter what new oil fields we discover, global oil production will start declining in 2030 at the very latest.
That's the conclusion of the most comprehensive report to date on global oil production, published on 7 October by the UK Energy Research Centre.
CYCLE TRACK, here along New York City's Ninth Avenue, keeps bicyclists physically separated from motor vehicle traffic. Such designs make riding safer and could boost the number of women cyclists. Monica Bradley
From Science Daily:
Texas Tech graduate student Sarah Dillingham checks for the green light on a StickNet deployed for a squall line that passed over Reese Technology Center in February 2009. Credit: BCM, Texas Tech University
Little smasher: Oscar Wrigley is the youngest ever member of Mensa,
From The BBC:
The Ribosome
From Discover:
Australian researcher Elizabeth Blackburn, whose co-discovery of telomeres has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Credit: Elizabeth Finkel/COSMOS
Photo: Two young bonobos exhibit the ape equivalent of the human laugh, a “play face,” which is accompanied by laugh-like panting sounds. Just as in humans, if one ape laughs others usually do as well, especially during wrestling and tickling games.
This image shows the kind of pictures Jessen’s team produces with tomography. The top two spheres are from a selected experimental snapshot taken after 40 cycles of changing the direction of the axis of spin of a cesium atom, the quantum “spinning top.” The two spheres below are theoretical models that agree remarkably with the experimental results. (Credit: Image courtesy of Poul Jessen)
The bones of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx had flattened and parallel bone cells, one of the signs that this bird grew slowly, more like non-avian dinosaurs, researchers report in the journal PLoS ONE. Credit: Gregory Erickson.
CLIMATE RECORD: The records preserved in stalagmites and ocean fossilsm, such as those harvested from mud cores drilled by the "Resolution" pictured here, suggest that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have an outsized effect on the Earth's climate. © Science / AAAS
