The $150 Space Camera: MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer-Money Budget

The two students ( from MIT, of course ) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.

Robot achieves scientific first (Adam and Eve)

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators. Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The team has just completed a successor robot called Eve, which is about to work with Adam on a series of experiments designed to find new drugs to treat tropical diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis. “Adam is a prototype,” says Prof King. “Eve is better designed and more elegant.”

3D or Not 3D: That Is the Question

You saw the 3D Monsters vs Aliens commercial during the Super Bowl — maybe with the special glasses or, without them, as a myopic blur. If you took your kids to the Jonas Brothers movie, you sat through nearly a dozen trailers for 3D movies to be released this year. Perhaps you saw the latest issues of TIME, People and three other Time Inc. publications promoting 3D as "pretty darn cool," and citing such top directors as Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson as being in in love with the process.