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The government-sponsored competition to build the best ultra-fuel-efficient vehicles yields both automotive innovation and the next generation of car designers.

With bandwidth-heavy streaming apps such as Netflix, HBO Go, and Pandora out on the market, users are consuming more data than ever before on their smartphones. According to a new report by Nielsen out today, average U.S.

On Thurdsay, DVD rental giant Redbox announced that it will expand its offering to include video games at more than 21,000 of its kiosks nationwide. The new service will launch Friday, and include titles from the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3, all for roughly $2 per day

According to numbers dug up by Mashable , microblogging newcomer Tumblr has just surpassed the 20.7 million blogs hosted by WordPress--explosive growth since it only hosted around 7 million blogs as recently as January. Exponential growth like this means it's probably just the beginning of many record-breaking events

The Fast Company reader's essential rundown of who's breaking into and shaking up your tech space--updated all day. Google's Reputation-Management Tool New Dashboard tools streamline alerts about personal information that crops up on the web--wanted or not. This will be especially valuable to businesses wary of negative comments or outright lies.

Four years ago, investors gingerly handed over seed money to Lumosity, a startup creating brain games. Today they're happily tossing the same company $32 million

With new requirements to be honest about how well they protect and how easily they come off, new sunscreen regulations are a step forward, but could still result in you not getting the protection you paid for. Skin cancer is a major problem in the U.S; between 1992 and 2004, melanoma rates grew by nearly half.

At the Venture Capital in Education Summit yesterday, Jose Ferreira, CEO of Knewton , announced the first big partnerships that will have tens of thousands of students trying the adaptive learning platform he's been building for the past five years. What he calls a "data interoperability engine" promises to take any kind of educational content, break it down and present it to students at exactly the sequence and pace they need, while giving detailed feedback on performance to both students and professors. "We can classify students by ability level down to the concept,"

Researchers at the University of California and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Korea have been looking at the technology for two years now, and have come up with a proof-of-concept design that really could result in smell-o-vision, TV that pumps out odors to heighten to your immersive-TV experience. Nasal nostalgia is made possible by your brain's hippocampus --where long-term memories get sorted out--and it seems it's a very primal instinct, which may explain its power. You know what I mean: The way an unexpected whiff of scent will spark off memories of a long-forgotten partner

An ambitious new project by the British Library will place a huge number of 19th-century books--including original illustrations, page layouts, and design--on Apple's tablet for leisure reading.

When Google revealed its " instant " search preview powers last year, CEO Eric Schmidt was unequivocal about Google's aim--to try to get its search systems so honed that they'd get faster and faster, and ultimately may even know what you're searching for before you know you need it. Today it revealed Google Instant Pages, and while it's not quite to the point of tapping your brainwaves to predict your needs, it is pretty smart. Essentially, it's a booster to Google Instant that starts pre-loading the pages from search results before you even click on the link for the site you want

The Fast Company reader's essential rundown of who's breaking into and shaking up your tech space--updated all day. Facebook Prepares $100 Billion IPO (Report) Move over, Royal Wedding and Barack Obama Inauguration: Facebook's eventual IPO will eclipse Internet headlines for ages. COO Sheryl Sandberg has said that an IPO is "inevitable," because “No one is buying us, we’re going public.” The reported price would quadruple Google's $23 billion IPO.

New MacBook Airs We've wondered when the MacBook Air was going to get some attention with new CPUs and Thunderbolt, and

Google TV's about to get a social discovery injection, courtesy of Redux--a website-based content discovery system--that could help transform it into a friendlier, customer-curated place.

Before we get self-driving cars and road-trains, MIT researchers think emergency co-drivers that only take control in dangerous situations are the near-future for robot driving. At least while we still have fallible human drivers driving around like maniacs. MIT's whiz kids have been busying themselves with a tricky problem--how to build a semi-smart car that could take control when the situation ahead of a human driver looks to dangerous to be left to our weak biological instincts