5 Deadly Sci-Fi Gadgets You Can Build At Home – “It’s 2009. Where are our jetpacks? And laser guns? It seems like the cool stuff of sci-fi movies is now the stuff of the billion-dollar military programs, and equally unavailable to us common folk. What the hell? Well, if you’re tired of waiting for this stuff to turn up on store shelves, it turns out a whole lot of these working sci-fi staples can be built on your living room floor. All it takes is some off-the-shelf parts, a little creativity and a complete disregard for your own safety…”

Turning sunlight into liquid fuels (Video) – “For millions of years, green plants have employed photosynthesis to capture energy from sunlight and convert it into electrochemical energy. A goal of scientists has been to develop an artificial version of photosynthesis that can be used to produce liquid fuels from carbon dioxide and water. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have now taken a critical step towards this goal with the discovery that nano-sized crystals of cobalt oxide can effectively carry out the critical photosynthetic reaction of splitting water molecules…”

iPhone OS 3.0 is coming, preview on March 17th – “We just got the announcement, iPhone OS 3.0 is coming. Set your clocks, mark your calendars. It’s going down March 17th…”

12 changes that would give US cybersecurity a much needed kick in the pants – “The group came up with 12 cybersecurity improvements that DHS and others involved in the protection of national networked assets should employ. According to the GAO report these recommendations are as follows…”

iPhone: Renegade app store opens but Apple wants to kill it – “Yes, Apple’s App Store carries great stuff for your iPhone. But some of the best applications Apple banned from the App Store are now found at an unauthorized store, called Cydia. Many have not yet heard of Cydia because it cannot be used unless you jailbreak your iPhone, a hacking process that preps the handset for running Apple-sanctioned programs. As of today, The Cydia Store gets into the game by enabling sales of sanctioned applications for the same 70:30 revenue sharing model that Apple offers. But Apple is already prepping to send its legal sharks after The Cydia Store by leveraging DCMA in order to push jailbreaking into illegal territory. The question is, does it make any sense at all? If you ask authors of ingenious programs that Apple banned from the App Store for questionable reasons, or for the users who obviously want to run them, Apple’s response is a stifling action against competition, one that threatens to kill the best iPhone software out there…”

Where America’s Largest Cities Get Their Water – An informative infographic

Windows 7: The State of the Beta – “Ever since Microsoft started to share early versions of Windows 7 with the world last October, the response has been, for the most part, pretty darn enthusiastic. At least when it comes to folks who blog, write for magazines, and otherwise have soapboxes to speak from. But vast quantities of civilian Windows users–including quite a few Technologizer community members–downloaded and installed the Windows 7 beta during the time it was available. I wanted to give more of these savvy laypeople a chance to share their experiences and impressions. So a couple of weeks ago, we launched a survey (using PollDaddy’s excellent service) to let them speak out. And the results are in…”

Google Calling – “The Internet search giant on Thursday is announcing a service called Google Voice that assigns users a phone number that consolidates voice mails and text messages from their various phone numbers and stores them a single location that can be accessed remotely. Google Voice also lets users make phone calls over the Internet…”

How to fix the most common Linux problems – “We can’t show you solutions for every problem that might arise, but we can show some of the common issues people face and, more importantly, show you how to go about identifying a problem. One more thing to bear in mind as you’re reading is that even if you can’t work out the solution yourself, an accurate description of the problem will be of great help when asking others for advice…”

Dissecting The Mobile Phone Plan Markup – “When we took a look into exactly how much data is being transferred, and how much it is costing the customer, we found that each service is each being charged at relatively high and largely different rates…”

Google and the Linux desktop – “Google will start rolling out its Linux desktop on netbooks. The company will begin there because netbooks are the only division of PC sales that’s actually still growing…”

Tiny Core Linux Has Just 10 MB In Size – “Maybe the smallest desktop-based Linux distribution, which requires only 10 MB free space on an USB drive, CD or an internal hard disk drive, Tiny Core Linux could give you a new experience and maximum Internet speed with a customizable X desktop and by running entirely in RAM. The Tiny Core Linux distribution is powered by Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, Fltk and Jwm. It shows fast booting speed and the latest version (Tiny Core Linux 1.2) comes with many improvements and bug fixes…”

It’s a first: Whale sedated to disentangle rope – “Scientists used sedatives to calm and then free a North Atlantic right whale entangled in rope off Florida’s Atlantic Coast — the first time a large whale was ever sedated in the wild, according to the federal fisheries agency…”

Reinventing the Kindle – “Okay, so Amazon’s Kindle is cool and it’s gaining in traction and people who have one buy a lot of books. 10% of Amazon’s book sales are now on the Kindle. [For books where both versions are available]. But it could be so much better. Here are my newest riffs for Jeff and Co…”

Unemployed (or Preparing to Be)? These Sites Could Be Your Best Friends – “We found a battery of new sites and services–such as LinkedIn JobsInsider, Recessionwire, and Uberi.com–dedicated to providing the kind of cost-cutting, job-search, and moral-support tools that can be invaluable during lean times…”

The 10 Must-See National Parks – “America’s most visited park logged 9.4 million visitors in 2007, according to the National Parks Service. And for good reason…”

Nuclear waste has no place to go – “President Barack Obama’s proposed budget all but kills the Yucca Mountain project, the controversial site where the U.S. nuclear industry’s spent fuel rods were supposed to end up in permanent storage deep below the Nevada desert. There are no other plans in the works, meaning the waste for now will remain next to Zion and 104 other reactors scattered across the country…”

People with thicker heads ‘are more intelligent’ – “A study has found that the thickness of the insulation of our brain’s white matter is directly linked to IQ…”

Hothead Technology bringing RFID tags onto the football field to save lives – “The system embeds a RFID tag with integrated thermal thermometer and a transmitter into a football helmet to broadcast stats to a handheld PDA up to 500 meters away which trainers would use to monitor athletes temperature…”

Top 10: Crazy Construction Projects – “Architects and engineers are artists in their own way; they are constantly pushing the limits of construction, defying the odds and laws of gravity in order to create structures that serve more than just a functional purpose. These structures become landmarks and statements of accomplishment to the world. From the pyramids of Egypt to the Empire State Building, this race to reach the heavens has been going on for centuries and continues today…”

Metamaterial Revolution: The New Science of Making Anything Disappear – “Xiang Zhang remembers the day he recognized that something extraordinary was happening around him. It was in 2000, at a workshop organized by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to explore a tantalizing idea: that radical new kinds of engineered materials might enable us to extend our control over matter in seemingly magical ways…”

The Broadband Gap: Why Is Theirs Faster? – “In Japan, broadband service running at 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs $60 a month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 a month…”

6 Totally Essential Photoshop Skills Even Your Mom Should Know – “For more than a decade, Adobe Photoshop has been the de facto image-editing program used by professionals and art students alike. But there are plenty of casual users who only dabble with Photoshop for simple tasks, such as photo resizing and cropping — oblivious to the sheer power of Photoshop’s graphics manipulation abilities. These decidedly non-power users (and we know some of you are included in this group) can do so more with this versatile program — and we’re here to show you how…”

Sporty joint implants could go the distance – “Future athletes should be choosing their surgical implants as carefully as their shoes, say UK researchers working on a way to customise joint replacements to specific sports or activities…”

Resurrecting the Planet’s Extinct Species -Can It Be Done? – “DingothylacineheadScientists at the Universities of Melbourne and Texas have successfully resurrected a gene from the extinct Tasmanian Tiger. This certainly isn’t Jurassic Park – more like a Jurassic Concession Stand – but it’s an incredibly important step forward in the study of animals thought to be lost forever….”

Yes, CEOs Should Facebook And Twitter – “Social networking has clearly reached a tipping point. Sites like MySpace and Facebook boast hundreds of millions of members. Barack Obama’s presidential victory demonstrated that platforms like YouTube and Twitter could transform electoral politics. Yet in corporations where such tools have been expected to bring profound transformations, there has been strong resistance to change…”

Glass pyramid that could house 1m people – “The development, named the ‘Ziggurat’, will be self sufficient and carbon neutral with power being supplied by wind turbines…”

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