That’s what a new analysis of toe bones suggests. Since the oldest extant shoes are only 9,000 years old, that pushes the history of footwear back quite a bit.

Here’s a fascinating first-person account on what it feels like to be a remote-controlled human.

A well is a hole in the ground. Sometimes it has water in it. Sometimes it has oil in it. But increasingly, in southeastern Saskatchewan, it has carbon dioxide (CO2) in it. Apache Canada Ltd. recently began injecting CO2 into its oilfield in the Midale area. EnCana has been injecting CO2 into the Weyburn oilfield …

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An Israeli company called Engineuity says it has developed a unique system to make hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as magnesium and aluminum–and that within a few years it can be commercialized in emission-free cars cars that will cost about the same as existing conventional cars to run. It sound promising–here’s hoping …

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…and accompanying image for a blog post on the new study from the University of Michigan’s Addiction Research Center that says smoking can lessen your IQ and harm your ability to think: “ No Wonder Existentialism Never Made Sense.”

No one won either of the $50,000 prizes in a NASA competition designed to lay the groundwork for space elevators–but a team from our very own University of Saskatchewan built a robot that managed to climb the highest, 12 metres, up a 61-metre cable using photoelectric cells to convert radiation from an industrial searchlight into …

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This is interesting: researchers at Oxford University and Imperial College London have identified the exact area of the brain that controls blood pressure–and discoverd that they can increase or decrease patients’ blood pressure by stimulating specific regions with electrodes. Right now that requires brain surgery, but once we perfect methods for stimulating specific parts of …

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It’s buckypaper: “10 times lighter than steel — but 250 times stronger.” Practically able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Fascinating stuff.

Browse this gallery of the top photos in this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, organised by London’s Natural History Museum.

…courtesy of the Japanese. But would you really want to wear a skirt while flying such a thing?

That’s Visco for short, and I can’t believe I haven’t run across this amazing site before. If you love pulpy SF art–who doesn’t?–you’ll love this site. (It also includes the much better recent cover art of existing magazines.)

…well, no, I’m not, but what else can you title a post about a congressional report in the U.S. endorsing the idea of buying heavy-lift airships–like the Walrus, a proposed hybrid airship capable of carrying 500 tons over 6,000 miles within a week, without refueling–to get troops and equipment where needed?