From TFIndiegogo: "This 2018 mission will be the first in preparation for human landing. The first Mars One crew is scheduled to land in 2025, with additional crew landing every two years. Before that, Mars One will have established a habitable, sustainable outpost via multiple missions scheduled between 2018 and 2022."

...watching grass grow.

I can build up a couple kilovolts by scuffing my shoes on the carpet.

Also, sure it might be 37% efficient, but do you realize how SMALL the density of RF energy is? The Friis transmission equation gives you some idea: it decreases by the square of the distance away from the source, due to that power spreading out in a sphere. When you start off with only a couple mW of power and an omnidirectional antenna, there isn't much power left to harvest when these tiny receiving "metamaterial" antennas are even just a few feet from an access point.

And what happens when a thief steals a phone and plants it in the bag of an unsuspecting commuter?

The design for this car appears to be inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion car. It features a similar aerodynamic "teardrop" shape and the same three-wheel design, although his was much bigger (and more fuel-efficient than most of today's cars). I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned anywhere in the article. There is a great video of the car doing laps around a traffic guard. Bucky was in the Navy and was fond of sailing, and he said that having the single wheel in the back made it feel more like you were turning a rudder on a ship than steering a car.

This is what I get for reading Slashdot during lunch. *looks down at couscous and pushes it away*

This is also a huge problem for spaceborne radiometers that observe the Earth's surface (example paper). A radiometer is essentially a very sensitive receiver, and there are portions of the UHF and microwave spectrum reserved specifically for scientific research so that terrestrial stations don't interfere with the measurements. Unfortunately, interference may occur from transmitters directly in the band, from adjacent channels, or inadvertent harmonics from poorly-filtered transmitters. Pinpointing and correcting these sources is a logistical nightmare, especially when you have to deal with every individual country's RF regulators.

You'd be surprised. These types of viruses are spreading at higher frequencies. It's only a matter of time.

The rise of wind farms has already led to complications with current NEXRAD weather radars, and these radars don't even scan that close to the surface â" 0.5 degrees is the lowest tilt. I can only begin to imagine the complications of wind farms interfering with military radars which scan much closer to the Earth's surface.

Now they want to point some sort of radar at a complicated source of ground clutter that's already difficult to detect and remove? I don't see how that's going to fly (no pun intended).

For more information: http://www.roc.noaa.gov/windfarm/how_turbines_impact_nexrad_user.asp

I stand corrected, but "snot robot overlords" just doesn't have the same ring to it...