Greenhouse-gas-pumping cars are, let’s face it, never going to be green. But innovative sunlight-powered fuel production techniques could inch motor vehicles towards carbon neutrality. Experimental solar-powered reactors have shown they can create the building blocks for synthetic liquid fuels. They’ve got a way to go, but these projects could take a big...

A professor of business surveyed more than 9,000 managers and workers and found a familiar paradox: nearly everyone considers email checking and texting during face-to-face meetings rude, but most people still do it. She suggests more meeting breaks fix the problem. In a longer piece about the nature of “incivility” and how younger workers’ familiarity...

Where PCs are concerned, faster is invariably better. But things aren’t so clear-cut in human society. The next generation of social robots will be better loved if they adopt more human-like behaviour – even if that means losing some of their raw efficiency. Norihiro Hagita and colleagues at the ATR laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, asked 38 volunteers to click...

Talk about flying close to the wind. A Japanese interplanetary spacecraft will begin its travels to Venus next week, to get the clearest ever view of massive gusts in the planet’s atmosphere. The Venus Climate Orbiter, called AKATSUKI, aims to find out why blistering winds zip around the planet at speeds of up to 400 kilometres per hour. The upper clouds can...

Android smartphones outsell the iPhone this quarter, Microsoft make their upcoming online suite Office Web Apps free to the public, and everyone is upset about Facebook’s privacy policies. Android Now Outselling iPhone [REPORT] Android smartphones outsold the iPhone in the first quarter of 2010, accounting for 28 percent of the market share versus the iPhone’s...

You have enough enemies when it comes to getting things done—having your own brain plotting against you is just unfair. Hone up on a few strategies, thought exercises, and habits that get you past mental roadblocks and back to productivity. . . . 10. Pick Good Sounds Megadeth doesn’t get everyone motivated, and classical is many folks’ idea of nap music....

A lake of asphalt may be the closest thing on Earth to the hydrocarbon seas on Saturn’s moon Titan — and our asphalt lakes are teeming with microbial life. Not only could these findings help in the search for aliens in our own solar system, but they could provide insight into the evolution of life on this planet. The largest naturally occurring asphalt lake...

Strap on your seatbelts, Android fans: Google has a new tool in its Google Goggles Android app, and it’s time to take it for a test drive. Google announced the debut of its Google Goggles image-based text translation feature this morning. The feature, integrated into the new 1.1 version of the Goggles app, allows you to point your phone’s camera at any block...

PEOPLE are extraordinarily skilled at spotting cheats – much better than they are at detecting rule-breaking that does not involve cheating. A study showing just how good we are at this adds weight to the theory that our exceptional brainpower arose through evolutionary pressures to acquire specific cognitive skills. The still-controversial idea that humans...

Pulling late nights, or an all-nighter, feels like a badge of honor you can wear at some jobs. But given the impact of sleeplessness on work, at least one researcher considers it like showing up at work loaded. A fascinating article on what we understand about sleep (read: not a whole lot) in National Geographic Magazine makes the case that workers, and the culture...