Joe Davis is telling me about his design for a 110-foot lightning-laser tower that will literally seize a hurricane’s force, bottle it up and hurl it angrily back into the sky. It’s intended as a memorial for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Davis—whose official role at MIT is research affiliate associate in the biology department—plans to name the tower "Call Me Ishmael." I ask him why, but before I finish the question, he smashes his steel peg leg down onto the table.

Good answer.

When Davis’ proposed 110-ft. memorial lightning tower is finished, it will be only the most recent instance of his lifelong unusual art-science repertoire. As a younger lad, he caught single-cell organisms using full-sized fishing tackle, built an ornithopter powered by real electrically stimulated frog legs, and in the 1980s became the first man to transmit the sound of a contracting vagina into space.

Ever wonder why some PSUs claiming huge wattages are so cheap? Why should you buy a branded one - or are you just paying for the name and some fancy cables?

Well, no, you're paying for the fact that it won't blow up - that's why we test PSUs to their limits and we never, ever recommend anything other than branded products. Some people don't listen though and Corsair recently took it upon itself to test some of shoddiest looking power supplies we've seen.

But now comes word that it isn’t just wildlife that can go extinct. The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.

Running out of oil, yes. We’ve all been concerned about that for many years and everyone anticipates a time when the world’s underground petroleum reserves will have been pumped dry. But oil is just an organic substance that was created by natural biological processes; we know that we have a lot of it, but we’re using it up very rapidly, no more is being created, and someday it’ll be gone. The disappearance of elements, though—that’s a different matter. I was taught long ago that the ninety-two elements found in nature are the essential building blocks of the universe. Take one away—or three, or six—and won’t the essential structure of things suffer a potent blow? Somehow I feel that there’s a powerful difference between running out of oil, or killing off all the dodos, and having elements go extinct.

Researchers measure activity of an exercising shrimp by time, speed and oxygen level.

In a Nature Physics journal paper currently online, the researchers describe how they have created a new, hybrid molecule in which its quantum state can be intentionally manipulated - a required step in the building of quantum computers... "This development may not bring us a quantum computer 10 years faster, but our dreams about these machines are now more realistic."

Remember that incredible Svalbard Global Seed Vault we told you about? It protects the Earth's plants for when aliens blow up our civilization so that they too can enjoy the natural decadence of fried plantains (that are generously fertilized by our decaying corpses). 60 Minutes got a peek inside the vault, and it's pretty neat stuff.

Many scientists have predicted this effect. Global warming already appears to be injecting more fresh water into polar seas due to increased precipitation and the melting of the Greenland ice cap. This freshening of the North Atlantic current makes its waters less dense–so they don't sink down to depths at which they would then be transported back south. As result, the circulation stalls, with warmer water no longer being drawn north.

You probably haven’t heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don’t. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate.

A large chunk of one of Antarctica's ice shelves broke off at the end of May, new satellite images show, marking the second major breakup of the shelf this year and the first documented episode to occur in winter... In February 2008, an even larger area of about 154 square miles (400 square km) broke off from the ice shelf, narrowing the connection between the islands to a 3.7-mile (6 km) wide strip of ice. After the most recent breakup, the connection was whittled down to just 1.7 miles (2.7 km).

Bill Henriksen, the manager of the McMurdo base station, said nearly 16,500 condoms were delivered last month and would be made available, free of charge, to staff throughout the year to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to buy them.

The base only has a skeleton staff through the long winter.

"Since everybody knows everyone, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable," Henriksen told the Southland Times newspaper.

The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.

The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a "dry glue" effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.

Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attact.

I feel it in my journalistic gonads.

"Using NASA, Japanese, and European X-ray satellites, a team of Japanese astronomers has discovered that Sagittarius A* let loose a powerful flare three centuries before the time at which we are observing it (i.e., 26,000 years in the past). X-ray pulses emanating from just outside the black hole take 300 years to traverse the distance between the central black hole and a large cloud known as Sagittarius B2, so the cloud responds to events that occurred 300 years earlier. 'By observing how this cloud lit up and faded over 10 years, we could trace back the black hole's activity 300 years ago,' says team member Katsuji Koyama of Kyoto University. 'The black hole was a million times brighter three centuries ago.'"

'The black hole was a million times brighter three centuries ago.'

A new study published in the American Medical Association has a new and astonishing demonstration of just how much your perception becomes your reality when it comes to prices. People in the study thought they were trying out a new kind of pain med. Instead, they got sugar pills. However, some were told their sugar pills cost $2.50, and the others were told the pills cost $0.10. People with the "pricey" sugar pill had their pain reduced much more than the "cheap" sugar pill. Does this mean that price alone pays for itself?

They say the meek shall inherit the earth, but these experiments with emotional computer programs (pdf) suggest it may actually be the neurotic. And that they'll probably take it rapidly by military force.

The Austrian researchers want games to be more engaging by having emotional, not just coolly calculating, computer players. Instead of just challenging your rational planning and decision skills, you'll have use your emotional intelligence too.

They created aggressive, defensive, normal and neurotic versions of the AI software in the war strategy game Age of Mythology, drawing on "the big five" emotional dimensions to personality recognised by psychologists.

There are two open source Van Eck projects that I know of. The first, pictured above, is Erik Thiele's Tempest for Eliza project. By drawing specific black and white patterns on your monitor, Tempest is able to generate audible signals in the AM range. You can use Tempest to play an mp3 file that you can tune in on your radio.

Tempest for Eliza is a fun demo, but what about being able to read someone's monitor remotely?

There's a second open source project, called EckBox, that claims to do just this. By piping the audio from a radio through an 8-bit analog to digital converter, EckBox claims to be able to read this data from a PC parallel port and reproduce the image of an 800x600 monitor. Looking at the code, it seems almost too simple to be true. Likewise, the project hasn't been updated since June 2004 and there aren't many references or screenshots or words of success floating around the net.

The Inaccessibility Pole marks the point on Antarctica that is furthest from the ocean. At 3718 metres above sea-level it is in the Australian zone and seldom visited.

The Scientific Traverse this week made it to the Inaccessibility Pole for New Year's Day and found a one time Soviet Union base buried under the ice.

The group's website says Soviet scientists first visited the Pole in December 1958 and built a small cabin there.

After several weeks they left, putting the bust of Lenin on top of the chimney facing Moscow.

They've ruined missiles, silenced communications satellites and forced nuclear power plants to shut down. Pacemakers, consumer gadgets and even a critical part of a space shuttle have fallen victim.

The culprits? Tiny splinters — whiskers, they're called — that sprout without warning from tin solder and finishes deep inside electronics. By some estimates, the resulting short-circuits have leveled as much as $10 billion in damage since they were first noticed in the 1940s.

Now some electronics makers worry the destruction will be more widespread, and the dollar amounts more draining, as the European Union and governments around the world enact laws to eliminate the best-known defense — lead — from electronic devices.

This guide attempts to explain the process of MP3 compression in simple terms, without oversimplifying it. Although some parts have been omitted, like the details of stereo encoding schemes and in-depth file composition, it covers the basic theory of turning uncompressed sound files into compressed MP3. In order to tour the MP3 codec without getting overwhelmed by the technical minutiae, we'll take a look at some of the background principles and legacy of MP3, then break the process down into analysis and compression before finally considering the impact that this humble format has had on digital audio.

I tested a table-top demonstration model, but here's how it works in the field.

A square transmitter as big as a plasma TV screen is mounted on the back of a Jeep.

When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation - similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker - that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings.

It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

The extent of Arctic sea ice will likely have melted to a record low this September partially due to man-made greenhouse gas emissions, researchers at the University of Colorado said on Thursday.

September and March generally mark the annual minimum and maximum sea ice extent, respectively.

There is a 92 percent chance that Arctic sea ice extent in September will melt to its lowest level at least since the 1970s, when satellite measuring efforts began, the researchers said.

They had predicted a 33 percent chance of a record low in April, but changed the forecast after a rapid disintegration of sea ice during July.

Such high levels of ice melting could have wide implications in coming years such as changes in temperature and rain patterns across much of the United States.

The biggest pipedream in all of travel is taking to the air with a jet pack.

Since the 1950s, modern man has dreamed about strapping on some type of rocket to his back and jetting off to work or play. This was supposed to be the future of travel. Back in 1953 when the first jet pack was built by Bell Labs, every ten-year old kid dreamed of the not-too-distant future, say... 1990 or 2000 when such an invention would be a simple household appliance. Just like flying cars, for example.

Well, unfortunately, science has let us down; the jet pack is no more a reality these days than a transporter.

According to Popular Mechanics, however, two companies are now trying to live up to the failed promises of science by making jet packs available to the public.

A new way to make artificial bone has been developed by researchers in Singapore. Susan Liao of the National University of Singapore and colleagues mixed various concentrations of collagen and carbonate to make a nanosized inorganic phase that resembles natural bone. The technique also allows different types of bone structure and dentine to be made for the first time.

Human bone is mainly composed of 65% hydroxyapatite nanocrystals and 25% collagen fibres. In dentine, which is found in teeth, this changes to about 70% hydroxyapatite and 20% collagen.

Scientists have tried to make nanosized artificial bone materials using various methods before now and have recently turned their attention to mineralised collagen, a nanoapatite/collagen composite. This material is highly biocompatible and has the nanostructure of artificial bone. It could be used in bone grafts and bone-tissue engineering, among other applications.

Dava Newman, a professor of astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just might if her new space suit design makes it off the launching pad.

Yesterday she unveiled the BioSuit, a skintight, next-generation space suit prototype that she and a team of researchers have spent seven years developing.

The new suit, which Newman is modeling here, could make space exploration safer and easier–and maybe a little more fashion forward–thanks to specially reinforced fabrics.