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With the arrival of its OLED lighting panel, the Lumiblade GL350, Philips Lighting is attempting to quietly usher in the era of practical OLED lighting. The diminutive squares, 3.3mm thick with edges not even five inches (they're precisely 124.5mm) in length, put out 120 lumens each. As organic light-emitting diodes go, that's really rather punchy. It's this higher output that has led the Dutch electronics giant to declare the GL350 "the first OLED that is suitable for general lighting purposes" in its product catalog.

Forgetting that cloak of invisibility - how about a device that hides you in the very fabric of time? New research published in Nature reveals that scientists have successfully hidden an object in both space and time - even if for only for 40 picoseconds. Rather than bending light around the object, their technique creates a temporal hole in light beams where an event can be hidden.

Louisville's hackerspace LVL1 is working on a home automation setup for the space, and they call it MOTHER. Using open-source home automation software called HOLOS, the capabilities include: * Monitoring of LVL1 Space Occupancy & Zone Occupancy * Measuring of "Hacktivity Levels" of each Zone * Monitoring of individual member occupancy * INSTANT WOMP MODE! (dubstep everywhere at the press of a button) * Notifications of "Abnormal" hacktivity levels * Monitoring of various websites and notifications of LVL1 mentions * Various "Nagging" (Take out the trash, It's cold please shut the door, I haven't seen you in 3 days, please come visit your mother, etc…) * "Member Scenes" - Auto setting of audio, lights, etc.. based on specific members present * Logging and Graphing of ALL data * Voice recognition and communication * Control of Lighting and appliances * Security System monitoring and notification of alerts * Phone calls and emails based notifications * Google Talk communication with AIML chat integration

What is learning for if it doesn't lead to wisdom? That's a question worth asking in light of an ongoing cosmological street fight being waged (remarkably) in broad media daylight. The rumble tumbled into the public eye with Lawrence Krauss' new book A Universe From Nothing. But before the scathing New York Times review and an acerbic rebuttal in The Atlantic, this physics vs. philosophy smack-down was brewing in academic back alleys for decades. At stake is a critical question living deep inside the heart of modern foundational physics: What are the limits of science?

The Being Human Conference, which took place at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts this weekend, was designed to explore the science of human experience. The speakers ranged from neuroscientists, philosophers and psychologists, to monks, poets and filmmakers - and together their collective ideas and insights shined a light on the complexities of what it means to be human in 2012.  

A report in the New Journal of Physics shows how the quest for an invisibility cloak is leading to cleverer ways to use and manipulate light. The trick could aid the analysis of complex samples or even communications.

The land in West Oakland where Eric Maundu is trying to farm is covered with freeways, roads, light rail and parking lots so there's not much arable land and the soil is contaminated. So Maundu doesn't use soil. Instead he's growing plants using fish and circulating water.