The Planetary Society

With many thanks for a great laugh SustainableBusiness.com! BEIJING (The Borowitz Report) – Showing its impatience with the debt ceiling stalemate in Washington, China today took the extraordinary step of putting the United States of America on eBay. Officials at the online auction site said they believed it was the first time a major Western

The effectiveness of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications systems improves as more and more people use it Basic car safety systems designed to save lives in the event of an accident like seatbelts and airbags are being supplemented in modern vehicles by increasingly sophisticated preventative technologies such as ABS and lane departure warning systems. The next

The arrival of a unique experimental demonstrator at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center on February 26 may herald a future in which many aircraft are powered by electric motors. The Leading Edge Asynchronous Propeller Technology (LEAPTech) project will test the premise that tighter propulsion-airframe integration, made possible with electric power, will deliver improved efficiency and

Grabbing the awkwardly shaped items that people pick up in their day-to-day lives is a slippery task for robots. Irregularly shaped items such as shoes, spray bottles, open boxes, even rubber duckies are easy for people to grab and pick up, but robots struggle with knowing where to apply a grip. In a significant step

It may have made another sort of mistake in solar energy   The company had a head start on technology that allows solar cells to be manufactured more cheaply, but lost out to Chinese competitors. BP has had its share of missteps, including the worst oil spill in history. It may have made another sort

The method could impact optical imaging, vision correction, and disease diagnosis A new method to make a low-cost, high-quality lens quickly using a 3D printer has promising potential to create optical imaging lenses, customized contact lenses for correcting distorted vision, or to even turn iPhones into microscopes for disease diagnosis. Developed by Northwestern Engineering researchers

Landmark global survey reveals major shortcomings in many countries around the world – Innovation Needed Governments around the world are leaving hundreds of millions of cancer patients to suffer needlessly because of their failure to ensure adequate access to pain-relieving drugs, an unprecedented new international survey reveals. The new data, released to the public during

How well did you sleep last night? If you don’t know you could try asking your mate, or you could ask your iPhone. Lark, a Silicon Valley startup has created a wristband that tracks your motion during the night – a standard sleep analysis technique called actigraphy. Data is sent via Bluetooth straight to your