Buck Rogers and James Bond used jetpacks, and since the 1960s, several real jetpack designs have been built from metal, plastic and propellant. None has flown more than a minute. Mr. Martin's machines can run for 30 minutes.

According to a report by activist site "Toward Freedom", for the past decade the search for a rare metal necessary in the manufacturing of Sony's Playstation 2 game console has fueled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The material is coltan, which is refined into Tantalum, used in capacitors and resistors. Wikipedia says

Tantalum is also used to produce a variety of alloys that have high melting points, are strong and have good ductility. Alloyed with other metals, it is also used in making carbide tools for metalworking equipment and in the production of superalloys for jet engine components, chemical process equipment, nuclear reactors, and missile parts.

All of Tiffany's trademark infringement claims against eBay were rejected — a knockout blow to the four-year-old lawsuit that had been closely watched by Internet companies as well as luxury goods makers seeking to stop the sale of counterfeit products online.

Tiffany & Co had alleged that eBay turned a blind eye to the sale of fake Tiffany silver jewelry on its site. EBay had countered that it was not in a position to determine which goods were knock-offs of the prestigious New York brand and had said the jeweler did not adequately participate in eBay's programs that help brand owners prevent fraud.

The judge, in a 66-page decision following a non-jury trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan last November, said he was "not unsympathetic" to Tiffany and others who have invested in building their brands only to see them exploited on the Web. But he said the law was clearly on eBay's side.

the company likely to get the most scrutiny is a small Silicon Valley startup called NebuAd Inc.

NebuAd has drawn fierce criticism from privacy advocates in recent weeks for working with Internet service providers to track the online behavior of their customers and then serve up targeted banner ads based on that behavior.

According to Ari Schwartz, vice president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a civil liberties group, NebuAd's business model raises many of the same concerns as an earlier generation of "adware" companies. Those companies developed software programs that — when downloaded to a computer — could track where a user went on the Internet and mine that information to deliver customized online ads. Several NebuAd executives in fact were once employed by Gator Corp., an adware company that later renamed itself Claria Corp.

A gravitational lens can do more than reveal details of the distant universe. In an unexpected collision of astrophysics and algebra, it seems that this cosmic mirage can also be used to peer into the heart of pure mathematics.

Rhie no longer works in academia, having run out of funding. "I didn't even bother to submit my papers to journals because I had been so much harassed by the referees [of earlier papers]," she told New Scientist. "I was new to gravitational lensing at that time. What I said and the way I said it must have been unfamiliar to the gravitational lensing experts."

"A lot of the guys who were doctors during the Civil War were pretty cutting-edge," she says; many were medical-school professors or were supervised by them. "These were guys who knew their stuff. . . . Some of the treatments they used aren't necessarily that far off [from what we'd use today]."

For example, contradicting our modern perception, anesthesia was used amply and effectively. "Doctors would give [soldiers] just enough anesthesia so they weren't feeling pain but not enough that they were completely relaxed, so they would thrash and moan and people would have to hold them down," Schroeder-Lein says. "It would look like they were having their amputation without anesthesia, but in fact they woke up not remembering anything."

With nearly 13 million online users, the rapidly expanding virtual world Second Life is a risk for children, who could be sexually exploited, U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said Monday. Kirk sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting a consumer-alert warning about its dangers.

On Thursday, following months of internal bickering over Mary Gade's interactions with Dow, the administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Midwest office, based in Chicago.

Gade told the Tribune she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson took away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired by June 1.

Many local residents see Dow as a lifeline in region plagued by plant closings and layoffs. But all along the two wide streams that cut through this old industrial town, signs warn people to keep off dioxin-contaminated riverbanks and to avoid eating fish pulled from the fast-moving waters. Officials have taken the swings down in one riverside park to discourage kids from playing there. Men in rubber boots and thick gloves occasionally knock on doors, asking residents whether they can dig up a little soil in the yard.

Albert Hofmann, a scientist who discovered and created the drug Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938, has died today at the age 102.

StopTheDrugWar.com reports that Hofmann's [sic] died of a heart attack in his house located in Basel, Switzerland.

After discovering LSD, he set it aside for five years, until April 16, 1943, when Hofmann decided to take another look at it. While re-synthesizing the LSD, he accidentally consumed a small sample and serendipitously discovered its powerful effects. Three days later, on April 19, Hofmann deliberately consumed 250 micrograms of LSD before his bicycle ride home.

He is now known as the first person to experience a 'trip' from taking it. Since then, LSD aficionados around the world unofficially proclaimed April 19, 1943 as Bicycle Day. Despite that, Hofmann denounced the illegal use of the drug which became popular in the 1960's. He was also said to be disappointed that further research was not conducted on it at the time.

No matter how powerful a conventional lens, it cannot focus light down to more than about half its wavelength, the "diffraction limit". This limits the amount of data that can be stored on a CD, and the size of features on computer chips.