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Physicists from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) have demonstrated a new technique to control the speed and direction of light using memory metamaterials whose properties can be repeatedly changed.

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More salmon, please! A new study shows how biomimicry can help generate energy. A new source of inspiration for wind farm engineers has come from an unlikely place: the sea. By imitating schools of fish, engineers can increase wind farm output--potentially getting up to 10 times more power from the same site compared to traditional wind farms

Most people spend a major chunk of their waking hours at work, where often the boss looms large. Just how influential the boss is on an employee’s self-image might depend on culture, a study in the February 16 PLoS ONE reports

The iPad magazine looks gorgeous and works about as well as Zite, Flipboard, et. al. It even understands if you're not into AOL content.

The app world is a messy place: millions of apps floating in the cloud, never receiving attention. It's also incredibly fragmented, with apps developed for myriad devices and platforms--your smartphone, tablet, computer, social networks, and browsers

Solar Ivy's panels aren't your typical gray slabs. They might actually improve the appearance of a house. Solar panels don't tend to win beauty contests.

There was one recent positive survey, but test after test has found that people aren't so psyched when smart meters arrive in their home. They may not have a choice. There are actually two electrical grids being built in the U.S

The Colchester Zoo in England is home to a community of mandrills, the largest of the monkeys. One of these mandrills, a female named Milly, began covering her eyes with her hand when she was three. A dozen years later Milly and her zoo mates continue to perform this gesture, which appears to mean “do not disturb.” The signal is the first gesture with cultural roots reported in monkeys

Although high-temperature superconductors are widely used in technologies such as MRI machines, explaining the unusual properties of these materials remains an unsolved problem for theoretical physicists. Major progress in this important field has now been reported by physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a pair of papers published back-to-back in the July 29 issue of Physical Review Letters.

In California, Latinos and African-Americans simply are not buying electric cars. It's time for some new marketing. The Prius is an emblem of the environmentally aware upper middle class, and at this point, electric vehicle purchases are mostly limited to early adopters who have the cash to experiment with an entirely new kind of vehicle.

The new fund is helping supermarkets open in poor neighborhoods, funding farmer's markets in others, and even offering money for innovative food solutions that no one has thought of yet. Walmart recently announced a plan to bring hundreds of stores to fresh-food-starved "food deserts" across the U.S., but the just-announced California FreshWorks Fund has a more localized--though still ambitious--goal: to bring healthy food to underserved communities and to galvanize local economies in the process. We had the chance to talk to NCB Capital Impact, the national community development financial institution that's administering the fund, about who gets the cash and why

As Congress gears up for another budget fight, environmental protections--from endangered species to clean water to pollution rules for power plants--are all on the chopping block. Once the debt ceiling debate is settled, Congress is going to have to re-focus on the budget that almost shut down the government a few months ago

The future of U.S. medical-device design may reside in developing countries. In India, where a chaotic road system spawns many accidents and hospitals are often hours away, the need for an inexpensive alternative vascular access is great.

Whether or not the increased number of natural disasters is real or imagined, one thing is clear: We're paying more and more money to deal with their aftermath. Major weather disasters appear to be occurring so frequently that they are now often referred to as the new normal . But are there actually more disasters, or are we just more attuned to their presence