Check out this inexpensive one-person vacuum elevator, which can be “slotted into an existing building with a minimum of fuss.” Very futuristic.

Science fiction headline of the day: “Disintegrator Plus™: Harnessing the Power of Plasma”. Yes, it’s a home disintegrator, the dream of all little SF-reading boys everywhere come true at last. *Sniff.* I’m getting all misty-eyed…

I just dabble with my occasional “Science Fiction headline of the day” feature. Technovelgy.com has built a whole section of his (highly recommended) Web site around it.

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have come up with a new–and much faster–way to create an accurate 3D model of an urban landscape. The new technique will be used by the military first, but soon enough car rental agencies, emergency workers, urban planners and, you can bet, computer game developers will be finding …

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The dangers of the rate at which state-of-the-art technology becomes obsolete are illustrated by this story about the Field Museum’s efforts to re-record voice recordings from 1958 describing more than 6,000 artificats collected by Captain A. W. F. Fuller. It’s a little disturbing to find out that what was state-of-the-art the year before I was …

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Boys and girls are different…and not just in the obvious ways. Even their brains are wired differently–which has implications for everything from education to the treatment of mental disorders. The differences between the male and female brain are the focus of a lengthy article by Larry Cahill, a neurobiologist at the University of California in …

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Here’s an update on the prospects for finding life on Mars…and those prospects, many scientists are beginning to believe, are excellent.

Pie in the sky? An awful lot of people don’t think so. It so happens there’s a major carbon-dioxide-using enhanced oil recovery project just about an hour south of here, down in my old stomping grounds around Weyburn.

There’s a Time Traveler Convention planned for this Saturday, May 7, at MIT. It was great; I had a fabulous time.

There is no practice so strange that it cannot spawn its own sub-culture. Here’s one with a particularly SF-ish vibe (with a hefty overtone of, oh, let’s call it cyberpunk primitivism): circuiit-bending.

…or, at least, the planets, but that’s not as nicely alliterative. Here’s an update on the most romantic form of space propulsion you can imagine: the solar sail. I’ve loved this technology since I first read about it in science fiction novels decades ago. And now, at last, it might be on the verge of …

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I never had training wheels on my bicycle. I also fell over a lot. Now an industrial design team has come up with a revolutionary trike/bike: it starts out as a kind of trike, with two rear wheels that splay out at the bottom for stability, then transforms into a bike as the rider gains …

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