With gargantuan ears, gleaming brown eyes, a fuzzy white muzzle and a squat, furry body, Leonardo looks like a magical creature from a Harry Potter book. He’s actually a robot powered by an innovative set of silicon innards. Like a typical 6-year-old child, but unlike standard robots that come preprogrammed with inflexible rules for thinking, Leonardo adopts the perspectives of people he meets and then acts on that knowledge. Leonardo’s creators, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Personal Robots Group and special effects aces at the Stan Winston Stu... (p. 24)

If asked to name stupendously amazing things in space, most people would probably pick black holes. These evil-tinged clowns of the universe are definite wows. Insatiable is their middle name. Grand and merciless, voracious and monstrous, pure appetite and deep mystery. The biggest fatten themselves in galaxy cores mainly via a seemingly limitless hunger for a main source of sustenance: fat, circular wads of gas that gather around the black holes and are sometimes given a name to delight any glutton, Polish doughnuts. Black holes cloak their innards behind an “event horiz... (p. 18)

Scientists have re-named and categorized the objects in the night sky for hundreds of years as advances in technology have improved our understanding of the universe.

Some types of plastic might be bad for our health, suggests a growing body of research.

Locally grown food is often touted as a perk of rural living. But if Dickson Despommier has anything to say about it, city dwellers will soon have the same environmental bragging rights. Despommier wants cities to grow their own food. Not in rooftop gardens or neighborhood plots, but in light-filled buildings of glass and steel; tilapia on the first floor, tomatoes on the 12th. It’s called vertical farming, baby, and it may be coming to a skyscraper near you. The idea is bold, but Despommier makes a compelling case. Across a scattering of labs and discip... (p. 16)

Amid the liveliest stars in the cosmos lie stellar corpses. Of these dead stars, the most abundant are white dwarfs — stars that in their prime were similar to the sun. These dense corpses foreshadow what will become of most of the stars in the universe. Although white dwarfs are dead, they aren’t useless. Postmortem examination shows they have different masses and different chemical makeups. Some are strongly magnetic. Others pulsate. A few even have orbiting planets and debris disks. “Understanding why these cadavers are all different might help us understand the li... (p. 26)

Scientists expect that LED lights and their organic cousins, OLEDs, will one day make our homes and offices much brighter, while using less energy.

Loosening a half-inch screw may not sound like a job for a rocket scientist. But now imagine performing that task 32 times with your hand inside a pressurized glove so stiff it’s hard to bend your fingers, let alone grab a screwdriver. Now try holding on to the screwdriver in your gloved hand but while you’re floating in space. One additional obstacle: A strut blocks direct access to the screws. That’s just one of the challenges facing the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis, set to pay a final servicing call to the most celebrated observatory in history—the ... (p. 24)

A blog entry on the Sussex Amateur Brain Surgery Club’s website boasts that “these days, brain surgery is very much the preserve of professional surgeons, but we at the Amateur Brain Surgery Club believe that anyone can do it, with a few basic tools and a little care.” The post is a spoof, but whoever penned those words may be on to something. The right tools could make treating the brain a simpler, less invasive process. Researchers have zeroed in on two such tools—sound waves and microscopic bubbles—that may eventually allow doctors to tackle a range of ... (p. 20)

It's the ultimate way to pull off a sting: Teach a group of ordinary honeybees to ignore flowers and,  instead, focus on vapors from explosives used in bombs. Then send the bees off in teams to sniff out terrorists. Or track the molecular trail of illicit drugs, or even point police to a rotting corpse. In recent years, researchers have shown that with just a few minutes of training, undercover bees can detect the smell of TNT, methamphetamine or almost any other scent just as the bees would respond to pollen. Wasps’ sniffing abilities may also be put to use finding... (p. 16)

Stem cells’ powers of self-renewal, immortality and potential for medicine inspire those who study them. But progress toward understanding them has been slow — it took 20 years just to figure out how to grow embryonic stem cells in the laboratory. More recently, though, molecular techniques have enabled swift movement on two fronts. Researchers are starting to see how stem cells can replenish their numbers while giving rise to specialized cells. Others are learning how to turn adult skin cells into cells more like their embryonic ancestors. These advances offer hope that sci...

A century ago, mathematician Hermann Minkowski famously merged space with time, establishing a new foundation for physics; today physicists are rethinking how the two should fit together