The Race to 100 MPG
Over the past several decades, the promise of the "car of tomorrow" has remained unfulfilled, while the problems it was supposed to solve have only intensified. The average…
View ArticleNetflix Awards $1 Million Prize For Improved Recommendations Engine
A team of former rivals has officially won the competition to improve Netflix movie recommendations. The collaborative known as BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos took home a…
View ArticleLaserMotive is First Ever Prize Winner in Space Elevator Games
First proposed in 1895, and popularized by the Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise, space elevators have a rich history in the culture of space travel.
View ArticleInventor of Photosynthesis-Based Solar Cells Wins Millennium Tech Prize
A Switzerland-based chemist who invented solar cells that mimic photosynthesis is the winner of a million-dollar technology prize announced Wednesday. Michael Gratzel…
View ArticleThis Year's Ig Nobel Prize: Fruit Bat Fellatio, Whale Snot, and More Weird...
If the MacArthur "Genius" Grants announced earlier this week were too staid for you, the Ig Nobel Prize (now in its 20th year--here's last year's coverage) might be the…
View ArticleCarbon Is So Hot Right Now: Chemistry Nobel Awarded for Carbon-Bonding Technique
First graphene, now this: Carbon is just the hottest element on the block these days. The 2010 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has just been awarded to three chemists who have come up with a technique that...
View ArticleMIT Scientist Offers $100,000 to Anyone Who Can Prove Quantum Computing Is...
Scott Aaronson, a scientist at MIT who works mostly with theoretical quantum computers, issued a challenge to all of those deniers out there: prove that "scalable quantum…
View ArticleNine Unsuspecting Scientists Win $27 Million in Suddenly Announced...
A Russian physics student turned social media billionaire just made theoretical physics the most lucrative thing in science, heaping $3 million apiece on nine researchers. The new Fundamental Physics...
View ArticleSilicon Valley Tycoons Bestow Surprise $33 Million Prize On 11 Unsuspecting...
Cori Bargmann's research at the Rockefeller University has shown nematode worms, one of the simplest lab animals in biology, exhibit surprisingly complex behavior when…
View ArticleFoundation Offers $1 Million Prize For A Bioengineered Liver
How much is a liver worth? For someone on a waiting list for a transplant, that might be hard to tally. But one nonprofit is now saying it’s willing to pay a specific price…
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