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LET'S face it: power cables are unsightly dust-traps. PCs, TVs and music players are becoming slicker every year, but the nest of vipers in the corner of every room remains an ugly impediment to true minimalism.

Unshackling our electronics (Image: Jay Myrdal/Getty)
Then there is the inconvenience of charging phones, MP3 players and PDAs. A minor hassle, [...]

People used to think that the heavens were a vast clockwork, with planets and moons moving in circular orbits like a vast timepiece.  Recent advances have shown us that this stellar machinery is far vaster than they ever suspected – even our galaxy has satellites, mini-galaxies orbiting the Milky Way and some of them could [...]

Siberian tiger cubs are seen at the Dalian Forest Zoo in Dalian, Liaoning province February 7, 2010. Credit: Reuters/Jacky Chen

BEIJING (Reuters) – China has an estimated 50 or fewer tigers left living in the wild, but efforts to stabilize one population in the bleak northeast are starting to pay off, a conservationist said on Monday.

 
Tigers [...]

The launch is among the final space shuttle missions, and the last to occur in darkness (Getty Images)

The US space shuttle has made its final night launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The Endeavour orbiter soared into the Florida sky on a 13-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
It is delivering a connecting [...]

A colony of sea lions endemic to the Galapagos Islands have moved 1,500km away, a Peru-based organisation which monitors the aquatic mammals has said.

Galapagos sea lions are unique to the archipelago Photo: Genevieve Johnson
The Organisation for Research and Conservation of Aquatic Animals says the sea lions have swum to northern Peru because of rising [...]

Bees can be trained to recognize human faces, so long as the insects are tricked into thinking that the faces are oddly shaped flowers, new research shows. The insects use the arrangement of facial features to recognize and distinguish one face from another. (Credit: iStockphoto/Joseph Calev)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2010) — Going about their day-to-day business, [...]

ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2010) — Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built an enhanced version of an experimental atomic clock based on a single aluminum atom that is now the world's most precise clock, more than twice as precise as the previous pacesetter based on a mercury atom.

NIST postdoctoral researcher [...]

In this photo released by Sea Shepherd, anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd's ship the Bob Barker, left, and Japanese harpoon boat the Yushin Maru 3 collide in the waters off Antarctica Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010. It was the second major clash this year in the increasingly aggressive confrontations between the two sides. No one was reportedly [...]

WE HACK the climate at our peril. Volcanoes spewed so much sulphate into the atmosphere 94 million years ago that the oceans were starved of oxygen and 27 per cent of marine genera went extinct. Geoengineering our climate could inflict a similar fate on some lakes.

Starving the oceans of oxygen (Image: NASA)
So claims Matthew Hurtgen [...]

ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2010) — Robonaut is evolving.

Robonaut2 — or R2 for short — is the next generation dexterous robot, developed through a Space Act Agreement by NASA and General Motors. It is faster, more dexterous and more technologically advanced than its predecessors and able to use its hands to do work beyond the scope [...]