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 ...

A group called Science Debate 2008 sent a list of questions about science and technology policy to Barack Obama and John McCain, covering such topics as science education, stem cell research, the politicization of science, space exploration, and numerous other topics. Both candidates responded to the list of fourteen questions; their answers are ...

Today's tech buzz has been all about Google's release of its very own web browser, Chrome. I've seen tons of breathless blog posts, comments, and Twitter updates about this over the last 24 hours; hordes of people were eager to start downloading it the very instant it became available. Why? At its heart, Google is an advertising company, not a ...

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 ...

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 ...

This TED video of Roy Gould and Curtis Wong highlights Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope, which is a mashup of the best images of the universe from all the world's telescopes, blended together in an interactive, zoomable, and feature-rich interface. It will include Web-linked information on the various galaxies, nebulae, and stars depicted, and it ...

Yahoo announced today that their on-demand Yahoo Music service is being taken over by RealNetwork's Rhapsody. From the sound of it, Yahoo may be using Rhapsody only as an interim solution, pending resolution of Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo. I don't think I should be happy about this. Maybe ten years ago, I became a subscriber to the Musicmatch ...

First, there's this: The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional ...

I've had my new computer set up for about a week now, so I've had some time to play with Windows Vista (Home Premium, not that the version matters very much). So far, so good. I have an HP with an AMD 64 X2 dual core processor, 3 GB RAM, a 400 GB SATA hard drive, and an NVIDIA video board with 256 MB of video memory. With that hardware, Vista ...