Image: VSS Enterprise stowed under the dual-hulled Virgin Mother Ship (VMS) Eve at the unveiling of the first SpaceShipTwo in the Mojave Desert (Virgin Galactic)
Artificial Intelligence: It's not what we think. 
INTELLIGENCE John McCarthy, seated center, who ran the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, at a reunion last month with Bruce Buchanan to his left and Vic Scheinman on the right. Standing, from left, are Ralph Gorin, Whit Diffie, Dan Swinehart, Tony Hearn, Larry Tesler, Lynn Quam and Martin Frost. John Markoff
From BBC:
SDSU Professor Jihong Cole-Dai and his colleagues studied ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland and found evidence of a previously undocumented volcanic eruption exactly 200 years ago that contributed to the record cold decade of 1810-1819. (Credit: Image courtesy of South Dakota State University)
Petunias have sticky hairs that trap insects. Credit: Stockxpert
Image: Structurally sound: The neuraminidase protein of the H1N1 virus is particularly adept at mutating to avoid attack. In this crystal structure, the mutations that allow it to resist Tamiflu and other antiviral drugs are visible as multicolored stick structures. Credit: Dani
Photo: Marine Watchdogs: Dolphins and sea lions will soon be "sniffing" out suspicious swimmers near Puget Sound. ISTOCKPHOTO/EDIN
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for energy put out its second call for new ideas, and this time, the agency has narrowed its focused to three research fields.
The new arm of the Department of Energy, which is dedicated to high-risk, high-reward innovations, is betting $100 million on batteries for cars, new materials for capturing carbon, and microorganisms that can convert sunlight and carbon dioxide directly into fuels.
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New pollen and soil evidence suggests the eruption of Toba in Indonesia 73,000 years ago was so severe, the global environment was thrown into chaos. iStockPhoto
From Register:If you're concerned about Google retaining your personal data, then you must be doing something you shouldn't be doing. At least that's the word from Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt tells CNBC, sparking howls of incredulity from the likes of Gawker.
a) Colored scanning electron microscope image of the measured device. Aluminum top gate is used to induce a two-dimensional electron layer at the silicon-silicon oxide interface below the metallization. The barrier gate is partially below the top gate and depletes the electron layer in the vicinity of the phosphorus donors (the red spheres added to the original image). The barrier gate can also be used to control the conductivity of the device. All the barrier gates in the figure form their own individual transistors. (b) Measured differential conductance through the device at 4 Tesla magnetic field. The red and the yellow spheres illustrate the spin-down and -up states of a donor electron which induce the lines of high conductivity clearly visible in the figure. (Credit: American Chemical Society)
Time for your personalised shot (Image: Phanie Agency/Rex Features)
A genetic mutation may be the real reason overweight children cannot shift the pounds 
Computer annoyance: Pop-ups waste more time than they take to close, a study has found
Photo: The site contains remains of 500 "intentionally mutilated" humans.
Lucy Atkins's children Isabella, Ted and Sam with Rocket
From Wall Street Journal:
New evidence suggests that changes in the North American ecosystem didn't kill the mammoth - their demise may have brought the changes about. Credit: Wikimedia
In this schematic illustration of the material ejected from SN 2007bi, the radioactive nickel core (white) decays to cobalt, emitting gamma rays and positrons that excite surrounding layers (textured yellow) rich in heavy elements like iron. The outer layers (dark shadow) are lighter elements such as oxygen and carbon, where any helium must reside, which remain unilluminated and do not contribute to the visible spectrum. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Researchers examine skin cream on the nanoscale to better understand what makes it feel smooth
Enhanced and synthetic vision systems (inset) blend GPS information with a topographical database to create a moving digital map of unseen terrain and hazards. (Photograph by Sam Chui)
The Final Countdown: October 15, 2009: Virgin Galactic’s bullet-nosed rocket, SpaceShipTwo, sits in the hangar of Scaled Composites in Mojave, California, awaiting a paint job before its public debut in December. Click here to launch the gallery for a closer look at SpaceShipTwo under construction. John B. Carnett
A massive moon that orbited Uranus in the past may explain the planet's extreme tilt (Image: NASA/ESA/M. Showalter/SETI Institute)
Factory smoke. Photo: Martin Pope 
From The BBC:
Photo: Composting biofuels: Inside this white building, piles of sorghum are broken down into acids. The tanks in the foreground are used for pretreatment and for delivering a mixed culture containing many different organisms that break down biomass. The acids they produce can be used to make gasoline and other chemicals. Credit: Terrabon 
Researchers are closer to using tiny devices called semiconducting nanowires to create a new generation of ultrasmall transistors and more powerful computer chips. The researchers have grown the nanowires with sharply defined layers of silicon and germanium, offering better transistor performance. As depicted in this illustration, tiny particles of a gold-aluminum alloy were alternately heated and cooled inside a vacuum chamber, and then silicon and germanium gases were alternately introduced. As the gold-aluminum bead absorbed the gases, it became "supersaturated" with silicon and germanium, causing them to precipitate and form wires. (Credit: Purdue University, Birck Nanotechnology Center/Seyet LLC)
Electrodes placed directly on the surface of peoples' brains allow them to type just by thinking of letters. Image credit: stockxpert
From ABC News:
From San Francisco Chronicle:
From The New York Times:
John Criswick, an Ottawa entrepreneur who has booked a US$200,000 flight on board Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, stands in front of the plane at its unveiling in July 2008. (HO, Virgin Galactic/THE CANADIAN PRESS)
Photo: Silhouette of Very Large Array (VLA), which has contributed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In Arizona, a school IT director lost his job over a hunt for alien life. Newscom
From Space Travel:
Rows of jars containing Drosophila, also known as fruitflies, being bred in laboratory conditions. As Drosophila can be bred easily in mass and have a short lifespan, scientists frequently use them in research, particularly in the study of genes. (Credit: Wellcome Library, London)
The OrbiTouch keyboard, originally created to help people with carpal tunnel syndrome, is taking the gaming world by storm. Credit: Blue Orb
May 31: A video from the National Ignition Facility explains what the super-laser experiment is designed to do. NIF / LLNL
Photo: Corbis
Astronaut Hangout to Close After 30 Years -- Space.com
Lasers for Scanners Uh sir, you're not supposed to have that TriStar Pictures