Man-Made Noise
Bernie Krause listens to nature for a living. After having recorded nature for 40 years, he's noticing some alarming -- the natural sound of the world, biophony, is vanishing. Man-made noise is creeping into the most remote regions of Earth and Bernie argues that it's ruining our ecology. Animals divide up the acoustic spectrum so they don't interfere with one another's voices; no two species u... posted on Jun 09 2008, 3,248 reads

MIT's Humanitarian of the Year
Innovations need not be as complex as they are made out to be; in fact, it is often the simple ideas that have the deepest impact. Tapan Parikh, MIT Technology Review's Humanitarian of the Year, is a living example of that notion. Whether it is helping fair-trade coffee farmers ensure compliance in Guatemala or streamline micro-finance processes in Africa, Parikh is creating useful technology th... posted on Jun 05 2008, 4,027 reads

Science Reinvented
The explosively growing World Wide Web has rapidly transformed retailing, publishing, personal communication and much more. Innovations have forced old-line institutions to adopt whole new ways of thinking, working and doing business. Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers -- and not just the younger ones -- have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wiki... posted on Mar 10 2008, 2,567 reads

14 Engineering Challenges
Throughout human history, engineering has driven the advance of civilization. From the metallurgists who ended the Stone Age to the widespread development and distribution of electricity and clean water, to automobiles and airplanes, radio and television, spacecraft and antibiotics, computers and the Internet, engineering has made incredible strides. For all of these advances, though, as the popul... posted on Feb 21 2008, 4,335 reads

Cell Phone That Reads to The Blind
If you have normal vision and can read, there are thousands of things you do every day without even thinking even about it, little problems you solve with just a glance -- like knowing which coffee bag in a hotel is caffeinated or decaf. James Gashel is blind, but he can distinguish the difference with help from his cell phone. "All you have to do is snap a picture of the bag, and it tells you," h... posted on Feb 07 2008, 2,967 reads

A New Kind of Office Heating
A Swedish company plans to harness the body heat generated by thousands of commuters scrambling to catch their trains at Stockholm's main railway station and use it for heating a nearby office building. It's believed the system can provide about 15 percent of the heating needed for a 13-storey building being built next to the Central Station in the Swedish capital. "It just came up at a coffee mee... posted on Jan 10 2008, 2,680 reads

A 71-Year-Old Web Star
Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom MIT created to spread knowledge through cyberspace. A physics professor, who has long had a cult following at MIT, Professor Lewin's videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond ... posted on Jan 05 2008, 3,159 reads

Top 10 Celebrity Scientists
They brought us black holes and great whites, gorillas and chimps, footprints and evolution ... and weren't shy about it. This website offers a rundown of 10 of history's greatest 'celebrity scientists' including Richard Feynman, Jane Goodall and Stephen Hawking, complete with snapshots of their contributions and insightful quotations from each.... posted on Dec 18 2007, 4,876 reads

6-Month-Olds Show Social Intelligence
Babies are good judges of character long before they learn to speak, according to a new study at Yale University. Infants as young as six months preferred characters which helped rather than hindered others in a simple puppet show. "This is the very first experiment in anywhere near this age that shows babies develop preferences for individuals based on their actions," says Karen Wynn at Yale, who... posted on Dec 04 2007, 2,417 reads

Reading Reinvented
It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a sleek user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary. "The book," says Jeff Bezos, 43, the CEO of Internet ... posted on Dec 03 2007, 2,862 reads