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As storms become more powerful and more damaging, will living on the coasts become simply impossible? Insurance companies might try to price you out before we find out.

Using a network of smartphones mounted on car dashboards to help avoid stopping, SignalGuru can keep drivers from idling, the most fuel consuming--and frustrating--part of driving. Traffic lights are a necessary nuisance, but they're also incredibly bad for the environment. Idling vehicles in backed up traffic soak up fuel, and are a source of needless emissions

New renovations will let even "Post-Panamax" ships cross the isthmus, altering the economics of global shipping to the advantage of countries that produce cheap goods for the developed world. What a difference a century makes.

(Hint: You're already doing it just by reading this.) Here's a novel way to increase productivity: Try browsing the Internet.

Don't think you'd drink water recycled from pee? Well, you may not have a choice

What's been happening this week in the world of robotics?

Flying Food Group has seen steady growth since Sue Ling Gin founded the company in 1983 to bring a higher quality of food service to commercial airlines. As applications for the 2011 Inc

Sea urchin?

The irradiation of a metal surface with light or electrons can result in the formation of coherent electronic oscillations called surface plasmons, an effect ideal for applications such as optical communications on optoelectronic chips. Unfortunately, however, surface plasmons quickly lose their energy during transit, limiting their on-chip propagation distance. Jing Hua Teng at the A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering and co-workers from Nankai University and Nanyang Technological University under the Singapore-China Joint Research Program have now developed nanoscale structures that are able to replenish as well as guide surface plasmons on chips

Researchers at the National University of Singapore have invented a graphene-based polarizer that can broaden the bandwidth of prevailing optical fiber-based telecommunication systems.

Sickweather is the latest effort to mine data in order to reveal how common colds--and worse--are going around your neighborhood. Like it or not, sickness often infects you and your friends

Robots that walk, robots that talk, robots that suck and, yes, robots that blow. We've got them all in this week's roundup: (Okay, we lied about the robots that talk bit...but some of them do, you know?) Loch, Singapore's Android Singapore's Nanyang Technological University has been working on its nation's most complex full-scale android yet--Loch, the Low Cost Humanoid--for a few years, but he's been largely overlooked. This is a shame, because though he's from a nation you wouldn't normally associate with advanced robotics, he can walk, manage stairs, and resist being pushed off course.

A new social network, MyCube, thinks that we devalue our information when we give it away for free. Founded by Swedish entrepreneur Johan Staël von Holstein, MyCube offers users the chance to monetize their data, through advertising or a system of "nanopayments." Johan Staël von Holstein doesn't seem to like Mark Zuckerberg. "I have 5,000 friends on Facebook," says the Swedish-born entrepreneur , who lives in Singapore, but was about to board a flight from Barcelona to Germany, and then to Dubai, when we spoke by phone

Whom do bold thinkers look to for inspiration?

Decades of optimization have made the electronic switch both tiny and efficient.