That’s what they’re doing at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to the New York Times. Zap CO2 and H2O from the atmosphere with electricity and the air itself becomes petroleum:

This plan has a minor hurdle, too; the electricity for driving the chemical processes, according to a white paper describing the overarching concept, would come from nuclear power. [...]

So, Wired’s Danger Room has an interesting take on the Pentagon’s response to that crashing spy satellite we mentioned here not too long ago. See, just in case the fuel tank spreads a toxic cloud across America (or, I suppose, somewhere else on Earth), the Pentagon wants to use giant space lasers (or nearest functional equivalent) to zap the [...]

From the AFP newswire, a new blossoming of interest in robots built for sex:

Called Honeydolls, the lifesize figures are made from surgical-grade silicone and resin, and are equipped with voice-emitting sensors in each breast. Pinch the nipples, and Cindy (or Soari or Maria, depending on the model) will react with a squeal and whisper pre-programmed sweet [...]

A scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of shells about twice the size of grains of salt, embedded in sand.

You can find more at the Cosmic Light Galleries.

ScienceNews revels in the intersection of two very different fields of science, explaining how particle physicists are helping archeologists look inside pyramids:

Besides probing pyramids in Belize and Mexico, physicists are applying the muon method to studying active volcanoes and detecting nuclear materials. The concept sounds out of this world, but it’s really quite simple. When cosmic rays hit the [...]

Happy Valentine’s Day. From deep inside my heart.

If you want to know more about the strange imagery you’ve just seen, there’s a narrated version here, but the words are pretty dry.
(via)

Discover raises a further warning about the rapidly approaching obsolescence of humanity. We’ve now created robots that are evolving… and learning how to deceive:

Dario Floreano of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology… and his colleagues outfitted robots with light sensors, rings of blue light, and wheels and placed them in habitats furnished with [...]

Actually, he’d be a very, very old Peking Man indeed. Reuters recently carried a story about some very old bones found in China:

An almost complete human skull fossil that could date back 100,000 years has been unearthed in China, state media said on Wednesday, hailing it as the greatest discovery since Peking Man.

Last month’s find in Xuchang, in [...]

Remember the origami space plane?

Well, Japan’s astronauts are doing it again, space-travel.com reports, with one putting himself through special training to throw the first boomerang in space:

Astronaut Takao Doi, 53, is set to travel on a US shuttle in March to the International Space Station, where he will be in charge of construction [...]