Magnetic Flyers

SCI FI Tech SCIFI.COM: "Future spacecrafts may use the magnetic fields around Earth and other planets to bounce around the Solar System, providing a completely new method of space travel. It's all very complicated if you aren't some sort of rocket scientist, but the basic idea involves using radioactively charge particles to propel a craft with no rocket boosters required..."

Mind Scanners

Wired News: Pentagon Preps Mind Fields: "The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking..."

Croc Unearthed in Oregon

LiveScience.com - Jurassic Crocodile Unearthed in Oregon: "The fossil of an ancient amphibious reptile with a crocodile's body and a fish's tail has been unearthed in Oregon. Scientists believe the creature's remains were transported by geologic processes nearly 5,000 miles away from where it originally died more than 100 million years ago.

The new fossil is the oldest crocodilian ever unearthed in Oregon and one of the few to be unearthed on this side of the Pacific. The “hybrid” animal is thought to be a new species within the genus Thalattosuchia, a group of crocodilians living during the age of dinosaurs."

Fat Plastic

Chemicals May Play Role in Rise in Obesity - washingtonpost.com: "Too many calories and too little exercise are undeniably the major factors contributing to the obesity epidemic, but several recent animal studies suggest that environmental exposure to widely used chemicals may also help make people fat.

The evidence is preliminary, but a number of researchers are pursuing indications that the chemicals, which have been shown to cause abnormal changes in animals' sexual development, can also trigger fat-cell activity -- a process scientists call adipogenesis..."

Smart Germs

LiveScience.com - New Technique Stores Data in Bacteria: "
Artificial DNA with encoded information can be added to the genome of common bacteria, thus preserving the data. The technique was developed at Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus. If you think those USB flash memory 'thumbdrives' are small, check this data storage out.

According to researchers, up to 100 bits of data can be attached to each organism. Scientists successfully encoded and attached the phrase 'e=mc2 1905' to the DNA of bacillus subtilis, a common soil bacteria.

One early use for the technique would be to create special markers to identify legitimate versions of pharmaceuticals. However, the bacillus itself creates new copies of the data every time it reproduces itself, thus making it an ideal archival storage system..."