[News.com]
Microsoft has released its first commercial operating system for robots, with hopes of paving the way for a broader robotics industry and taking a central role in its development. The technology, called Microsoft Robotics Studio, is a Windows-based software platform designed to make it relatively simple to program robots. The software is free for hobbyists or researchers.

[Popular Mechanics]
10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2007.

[National Post]
Scientists may have cured diabetes in mice.

[The New York Times]
A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.

[Yahoo! News]
An innovative new memory technology that promises to replace flash in a wide range of products has been unveiled by IBM and two partners who claim their phase-change technology is 500 times faster than flash and draws roughly half the power.

[The New York Times]
Researchers have discovered that in contrast to nearly every other animal studied, a turtle’s organs do not gradually break down or become less efficient over time. Turtles don’t really die of old age, Dr. Raxworthy said. In fact, if turtles didn’t get eaten, crushed by an automobile or fall prey to a disease, he said, they might just live indefinitely.

[Los Angeles Times]
Scientists angered by closure of federal libraries, saying that cost-cutting moves at the EPA and elsewhere deny researchers and the public access to vital data.

[The Christian Science Monitor]
Renewable-energy entrepreneurs are increasingly bullish on the technology's future, estimating that if the cost to produce renewable energy continues to fall at its current rate, renewables could provide 25 percent of the nation's power by 2025 at no additional cost to the economy and perhaps even save money.

[National Geographic News]
The Ebola virus is marching steadily across western and central Africa, wiping out more than 90 percent of the gorillas in its path and threatening the species with extinction.

[BBC]
James Anderson defines a new number, "nullity," to address dividing by zero problem.

[PhysOrg.com]
After decades of intensive effort by both experimental and theoretical physicists worldwide, a tiny particle with no charge, a very low mass and a lifetime much shorter than a nanosecond, dubbed the "axion," has now been detected by Piyare Jain, the University at Buffalo physicist who first suggested its existence in a little-read paper as early as 1974.

[NASA]
Proof of flowing water on Mars? NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.

[The New York Times]
NASA has announced plans for a permanent base on the Moon, to be started soon after astronauts return there around 2020.

[PhysOrg.com]
The 2007 Digital Future Project found that 43 percent of internet users who are members of online communities say that they “feel as strongly” about their virtual community as they do about their real-world communities.

[Scientific American]
The 2006 Scientific American 50 awards.

[National Geographic News]
A new study suggests that organic globules found in a meteorite that slammed into Canada's Tagish Lake may be older than our sun. Most of the meteorite's material is about the same age as our solar system—about 4.5 billion years—and was likely formed at the same time. But the microscopic organic globules that make up about one-tenth of one percent of the object appear to be far older.

[ririan project]
22 ways to overclock your brain.