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For small business owners , choosing which vehicles you will drive or which cars to add to your commercial fleet can be tricky. On the one hand, you want cars that are comfortable and can accomadate the long hours your sales staff may spend in them, for example

Illustration by Dan Winters When supersecretive agriculture giant Cargill decided to attack the no-calorie-sweetener market dominated by Sweet'N Low, Splenda, and Equal, it sent its best marketers and scientists to basement war rooms and covert labs. Only now can the inside story of Truvia -- and its unlikely success -- be told. SAYS ZANNA MCFERSON , plucking a stevia leaf from a plant on her desk and biting into it, "I knew there had to be something we could do with it." Through the expansive windows of her corner office at Cargill's headquarters, an Aspen-like mega-lodge on the outskirts of suburban Minneapolis, she stares out at the snowy pines and at the horizon beyond

1. After its extended cloud services failure, Amazon's Web Services system is cranking back to life , bringing some of the web's big-names with it.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Some chemical elements appear much more abundantly in nature than others, which is partly due to how the elements originally formed. Scientists know that the light elements (hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and traces of lithium) were produced by fusion in the early Universe. Today, lithium, beryllium, and boron are constantly being produced in cosmic rays, while the heavier elements (up to iron) are formed by fusion in stars.

1. As the military battle for Libya goes on, a different battle has been won behind the scenes: Rebel forces have successfully hacked Gadhafi's mobile network, and have used it to establish their own communications grid. Gadhafi shut the networks and Internet down weeks ago, to confound the rebels

Microsoft has revealed some statistics to buff up the PR image of its Windows Phone 7 platform--and some of them are fairly impressive. But MS has been economical with the data it's willing to share. In a post on its Windows Team blog , Microsoft is setting out the "numbers that matter" after a year of Windows Phone 7's existence.

Now here's an incredible idea : A super-thin transparent screen coating for smartphones that could continuously top off your battery with solar power. The technology is coming out of a small company called Wysips , which has perfected a transparent coating less than 100 microns deep that captures enough energy from the sun to generate electrical power. It relies on the application of super-thin strips of photovoltaic cells laid down on a display screen, and then a precise layer of cylindrical lenticular lenses deposited on top

(PhysOrg.com) -- The U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory is now halfway toward completing construction of the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a powerful x-ray microscope nearly half a mile in circumference. Construction started in 2009 on the $912-million facility.

Cyberdine has just shown the next iteration of its HAL robots--strap-on exoskeletons that boost the user's strength with electric motors.

Dear EarthTalk : Instances of people with thyroid problems seems to be on the rise.

Technology has greatly aided our lives and made several previously difficult tasks easy. But technology has also brought some negative changes.

In the latest twist on optical knots, New York University physicists have discovered a new method to create extended and knotted optical traps in three dimensions.

If you're fed up of reading an Internet peppered with news about Charlie Sheen, then take heart: There's now a browser plug-in that'll censor Sheen-related references for you. If you're fed up of reading a Net full of Apple references, then tough luck--there's real talk that Apple was testing a 64GB iPhone version, as a prototype has leaked. On with the news.

Make room, Pixar and DreamWorks. Industrial Light & Magic, the special-effects shop behind the