Litter-Robot
One thing I constantly hear while rescuing cats is, “I love them, but I hate litter boxes.” Who doesn’t? Try smart engineering instead. Plenty of litter boxes have claimed automated self-cleaning, but the Litter-Robot is the only one I’ve seen that delivers. A weight sensor marks when your feline enters and leaves the device, which looks a little like the Death Star. The Litter-Robot then counts down from seven minutes and, as long as the sensor hasn’t been activated again, the globe begins to spin counterclockwise.

Gravity pushes the litter — any clumping or scoopable type — over a sifter, which separates the clean from the soiled. Waste is dispensed into a plastic bag in the bottom of the machine. Once the bag is full (about a week of single cat use) you open the drawer, pull out the bag, tie it up and throw it out.

There are two drawbacks to the Litter-Robot: its price, $329 (litter-robot.com), and its size — 29-by-22-by-24 inches — but that is a small price and a minor loss of floor space for never having to clean a litter box again.

Drawing on the power of the sun during the day, the plane stayed aloft at night using rechargeable lithium-sulphur batteries. Its more than three-day flight began on July 28 and was witnessed by U.S. and British defense officials, the company said.

Does science make belief in God obsolete?

This is the third in a series of conversations among leading scientists and scholars about the "Big Questions."
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To request a booklet containing all the essays, click here. For a PDF, here.
To view featured debates among the contributors, click here.

With their eyes, ears and nostrils closed, platypuses rely on sensitive electrosensory receptors tucked inside their bills to track prey underwater, detecting electrical fields generated by muscular contraction.

Evolution may be more powerful than genetic engineering.

A type of insect has developed the ability to survive while feeding on corn or cotton that's been genetically engineered to poison it, says scientist Bruce Tabashnik of the University of Arizona.

University of Arizona astronomer Michael Meyer, working with NASA's Spitzer space telescope, said his research shows that between 20 percent and 60 percent of stars similar to our sun have conditions favorable for forming rocky planets like Earth.

Lost City fluids also contain small quantities of hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane, and butane. A number of clues suggests that those substances, whose natural production usually results from the long-term heating of sediment rich in organic matter, were actually produced by inorganic chemical reactions, Proskurowski says. First, the rocks beneath the Lost City don't contain large amounts of organic matter. Second, the hydrothermal fluids are rich in dissolved hydrogen but contain a much lower than normal concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide. This suggests that what are called Fischer-Tropsch inorganic chemical reactions, which convert carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen into hydrocarbons, generated the substances.

Alexander Shatskiy, from the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, has an idea how these wormholes may be observed. For a start, they can be distinguished from black holes, as wormhole mouths do not have an event horizon. Secondly, if matter could possibly travel through wormholes, light certainly can, but the light emitted will have a characteristic angular intensity distribution. If we were viewing a wormhole's mouth, we would be witness to a circle, resembling a bubble, with intense light radiating from the inside "rim". Looking toward the center, we would notice the light sharply dim. At the center we would notice no light, but we would see right through the mouth of the wormhole and see stars (from our side of the universe) shining straight through.

By outfitting mice with a chunk of DNA that directs wing development in bats, scientists have created rodents with abnormally long forelimbs, mimicking one of the steps in the evolution of the bat wing. Their work gives weight to the idea that variations in how genes are controlled, and not just mutations in the coding regions of genes, are a driving force in evolution.

The slightly longer forelimbs of the transgenic mice "make them more batlike," says Nipam Patel, a professor of molecular and cell biology and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work. "It seems like a subtle difference, but evolution works by these subtle differences."

in about 350 million years, when the Pacific Ocean Basin closes as the Americas link up with Asia and Australia. That could be of more than paleontological interest, Silver says, because the loss of subduction and its associated volcanic activity would stop the cooling of the atmosphere by the dust from periodic eruptions--the planet's natural antidote to global warming. Hence, Silver says, the development "could have a dramatic impact on climate and thus surface life."

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction

"The biggest single surprise is how much we missed the boat with the human genome seven years ago, and how different we really are," Dr. Venter said in an interview. "The overwhelming message back then was that we are all like identical clones of each other. ... It's comforting to know we are more unique than that."

The discovery challenges the prevailing view of animal evolution, in which genetic information is passed exclusively from parents to offspring. The transfer of DNA from bacteria means that an individual could acquire and pass on genes that it had not inherited.

The biofuel of the future could well be gasoline. That's the hope of one biotech startup that on Monday described for the first time how it is coaxing bacteria into producing hydrocarbons that could be processed into fuels like those made from petroleum.

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You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.