Sniffer honey bees trained to detect bombs – “Specially trained sniffer honey bees may be coming to an airport near you soon, thanks to a successful new prototype that is about the size of a handheld vacuum cleaner. The Vasor136, developed by Hertfordshire Company Inscentinel, and partially funded by the Home Office OSCT (Office for Security and Counter Terrorism), is creating a buzz after successful tests with the government…” (12 images)

50 years of space exploration – A stunning summarization of space travel

From an icy slope, a medical miracle emerges – “What happened that day in 1999 changed her life and has redefined what is possible in cases of accidental hypothermia…”

MIT students develop concept for color-changing roof tiles that absorb heat in winter, reflect it in summer. – “In fact, Chu says that turning all the world’s roofs white would eliminate as much greenhouse gas emissions in 20 years as the whole world produces in a year. But some critics point out that in northern cities, the gain in summer could be outweighed by the loss in winter. The ideal situation, then, would be to get the advantage of white roofs when it’s hot and black roofs when it’s cold…”

Dow to sell solar shingle, sees huge market – “Dow Chemical Co (DOW.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Monday it would begin selling a new rooftop shingle next year that converts sunlight into electricity — and could generate $5 billion in revenue by 2015 for the company…”

What if iPhone had… “Cover Flow Multitasking”

Why It’s Time to Retire the 401(k) – “If you have even peeked at your account statements in the past year, it’s painfully obvious that something is wrong with the way we save. The tax-deferred 401(k) plan, and others like it, such as the 403(b) and the IRA, have become our nation’s go-to retirement piggy bank. Invented nearly 30 years ago as an executive perk — one more way to dodge Uncle Sam — the 401(k) was never meant to replace the employer-guaranteed pension fund, supplemented by Social Security, as the cornerstone of our nation’s retirement system. But propelled by a combination of companies looking to cut costs and consumers who wanted control of their retirement destiny, that’s exactly what happened…”

The Fall and Rise of Leo Laporte – “The Internet is considered by some to be both the future and the end of traditional media. Many new players are entering the podcast market every day, and most new shows fail within the first few episodes. Not so with any show produced by the TWiT network. From Steve Gibson’s Security Now to the usual gang of fanboys on MacBreak Weekly, TWiT podcast always show up at the top of iTunes’s podcast directory and are enjoyed by thousands of geeks. But what is TWiT, and how did it come to be? To know that, you first have to ask “Who is Leo Laporte?””

Tiny ‘nuclear batteries’ unveiled – “Researchers have demonstrated a penny-sized “nuclear battery” that produces energy from the decay of radioisotopes…”

‘Digital dirt’ can haunt your job search – “Gone are the days when all you were concerned with was whether or not your résumé and cover letter were error-free. Now, you’ve got bigger things to worry about — like what kind of personal information is floating around online…”

Britain has worst quality of life in Europe, study says – “In a study of ten of the largest European countries, Britain comes last followed by Ireland, with France and Spain topping the table…”

And the other Nobel Peace Prize nominees were… – “When President Obama unexpectedly won, he defeated more than 200 proposed candidates. These six are among the most inspirational on that list…”

does this chromosome come in a bigger size? – “Here’s a challenge for you in your spare time. Take a molecule about two meters long, break it up into no less than 46 sections and fit it inside a cell about a trillion times. And don’t just cram it in there because that huge molecule still has to be able to zip and unzip to relay its commands to some of the cells’ organelles. Speaking of which, there has to be some room in the cells themselves so they can carry on with their normal functions. You’ll have to fit it in the nucleus which is about 0.01 mm across. What’s that you say? Just not possible? It will never work? Who could’ve come up with such a ridiculous idea? Nature. And interestingly enough, not only did this problem come up during the evolution of DNA, it was obviously solved too. But the big question is how…”

Reinventing Power Plays – “Holden is in line to become Alberta’s first household generator, selling surpluses from a tiny green energy plant in his home into the provincial grid. Such consumer enterprise is supposed to become possible as of Jan. 1, 2009, under a provincial micro-generation regulation enacted last winter. “Efficiency finally matters,” he says when he explains his own plans as well as a strategy for making Enmax a model next-generation power company that its digital age marketers and image managers dub Utility 2.0…”

Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste – “By burning away all the pesky carbon and other impurities, coal power plants produce heaps of radiation…”

Seeing things: Researchers teach computers to recognize objects – “If computers could recognize objects, they could automatically search through hours of video footage for a particular two-minute scene. A tourist strolling down a street in a strange city could take a cell-phone photo of an unmarked monument and immediately find out what it was. And an Internet image search on, say, “Shakespeare” would pull up pictures of Shakespeare, not pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Shakespeare in Love. Though object recognition is one of the major research topics in computer vision, MIT researchers may have found a way to make it much more practical…”

Your Fall Home-Maintenance To-Do List – “As winter nears, it’s time to prepare your home for cold weather. These steps, at least some of which most homeowners can do themselves, will lower your utility bills and protect your investment…”

Kraken Becomes First Academic Machine To Achieve Petaflop – “The National Institute for Computational Sciences’ (NICS’s) Cray XT5 supercomputer—Kraken—has been upgraded to become the first academic system to surpass a thousand trillion calculations a second, or one petaflop, a landmark achievement that will greatly accelerate science and place Kraken among the top five computers in the world…”

[[[Interesting Reading #345]]]