Russ McBee

Today, BMW announced a pilot program in which 500 purely electric MINI's will be sold in California, New York, and New Jersey over the coming months. This ''field trial'' of the MINI E will allow 500 customers to lease the car for one year; during the trial period, MINI has agreed to pick up the cost of recharging the car. The numbers are ...

This is just unbelievably cool: The world's most advanced, commercially available, bionic hand has won the UK's top engineering prize. The i-LIMB, a prosthetic device with five individually powered digits, beat three other finalists to win this year's MacRobert award. The technology has been fitted to more than 200 people, including US ...

NASA's Phoenix mission to the polar regions of Mars landed flawlessly this weekend. The mission's goal is to drill beneath the frozen surface and extract samples of ice and soil, which the lander can then subject to a battery of chemical tests. This is one more exciting mission in NASA's spectacular portfolio of robotic planetary exploration. The ...

Three very cool stories caught my eye today. 1) Researchers have managed to decipher and play back a recording made nearly two decades before Edison's phonograph. The phonautogram was made in France in 1860 and represents the earliest known recording of any sound. Although the recording (and others like it) have been known for a long time, only ...

Jack Lail posted about JungleDisk the other day; it sounded interesting, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I like it. The idea is pretty simple, at least in the abstract: using Amazon's S3 online storage service, JungleDisk maps an online storage location to a drive letter on your PC. This provides a highly reliable, highly stable online ...

A Lufthansa pilot acted quickly to avert catastrophe as his plane was hit by a cross-wind just as the wheels were touching down on the runway: German airline Lufthansa said on Monday its pilots had averted a crash at Hamburg airport after a strong gust of wind caused a plane, with 130 passengers on board, to veer dangerously on ...

At last year's TED conference, one of the presenters was Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Imaging Team on the Cassini mission to Saturn. Her presentation focused mainly on a tour of the discoveries regarding two of Saturn's most intriguing moons: Titan and Enceladus. For centuries, Titan had been a mystery, its surface completely shrouded in a ...

TED is always a site full of provocative ideas. This video clip shows how little we really understand about the undersea world; most of the clip relates to visual camouflage and bioluminescence as tools for attraction, conveying information, and defense. Check this out: The octopus camouflage at the end is jaw-dropping, and the squid ...

This is very cool: One of the first large cargo ships in 100 years to cross the Atlantic with the help of the wind will set off from European shores this month on a voyage which is due to make maritime history. When the 10,000-tonne Beluga Skysail is well clear of the land, it will launch a giant kite, which wind tunnel tests and sea trials ...

Whoa: A 16 billion pixel image of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper has been posted on the internet, giving art lovers a detailed view of the 15th Century work. [...] ''You can see how Leonardo made the cups transparent, something you can't ordinarily see,'' [art curator Alberto Artioli] said. ''You can also note the state of degradation the ...