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"Dropbox is holding a promotion for students in which you can gain 3GB of extra Dropbox space for two years, plus more depending on how many people in your school sign up. To sign up for Dropbox's "Great Space Race," all you need to do is head to the link below and type in a valid .EDU email address (which you probably have even if you aren't a student anymore). After you confirm it, you should see 3 extra GB of space in your account. If you get others at your school to sign up too, you'll get even more space, going all the way up to 25GB. So sign up, tell your friends, and invite them if you haven't already for bigger bonuses!"

As a child, I always looked up at the stars and wondered how I could make it into space. Hopefully, I will live to see that day, but for now, a homemade satellite will have to do. The Nanosatisfi team has made it their mission "to provide affordable space exploration for everyone!," and with ArduSat, they move one step closer to reality. ArduSat is a Arduino-controlled miniature 10cm cubic satellite, weighing 1 kg, which is roughly equivalent to half a store bought loaf of bread. Its size might not be impressive, but it packs over 25 sensors including: Myspectral's open source spectrometer, inertial measurement unit, magnetometer, along the standard set, and many others. This impressive little machine boasts a camera to take photographs, it could send messages back to earth, or it can run your space experiments. With the ability to upload code directly to the ArduSat while in space, the possibilities are virtually limitless.

The Yomiuri Shimbun It may be possible to travel to space in an elevator as early as 2050, a major construction company has announced. Obayashi Corp., headquartered in Tokyo, on Monday unveiled a project to build a gigantic elevator that would transport passengers to a station 36,000 kilometers above the Earth. For the envisaged project, the company would utilize carbon nanotubes, which are 20 times stronger than steel, to produce cables for the space elevator.

SANTA BARBARA-"Maybe we're just too dumb," Nobel laureate physicist David Gross mused in a lecture at Caltech two weeks ago. When someone of his level wonders whether the unification of physics will always be beyond mortal minds, it gets you worried. Since his lecture, I've been learning about a theory that seems to confirm Gross's worry. It is so ridiculously hard that it could be the subject of an Onion parody. But at the same time, I've been watching how physicists are trying to power through their intimidation, because the theory promises a new way of understanding what space and time really are, at a deep level.

"International Space Station switches from Windows to Linux, for improved reliability"

On Tuesday, a new company called Planetary Resources will announce its existence at the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at The Museum of Flight in Seattle. It's not clear what the firm does, but its roster of backers incudes Google cofounders Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, filmmaker James Cameron, former Microsoftie (and space philanthropist) Charles Simonyi, and Ross frikkin' Perot.

Google has released a new software framework that aims to give programmers the ability to create interactive experiences in physical spaces. It could potentially be used to build interactive art installations or games that involve physical interaction.

If you've visited the LVL1 Hackerspace lately there's a good chance you've found yourself talking to an entity who speaks in a somewhat eerie female voice and goes by the name of MOTHER. You also may have found yourself engaging in "google talk" conversations with MOTHER in order to find out what members are present at the space, or what items are on the spaces grocery list; or perhaps you noticed that the overall environment of the hackerspace seems to completely change when a specific member walks through the door.

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

Each month Seattle-based Olson Kundig Architects' studio gets a makeover and the latest installation to be unveiled is a tented experimental mushroom farm! Design team CityLab7 collaborated with the architects to create an educational and interactive space that displays 215 oyster mushroom growbags, giving an example of how small-scale urban farming really works. As an homage to a city renowned for its coffee culture, visitors to the space will also see how coffee grounds donated from local cafes can be recycled into compost, becoming an essential component of city agriculture. Read more: Urban Mushroom Farm Pops Up in Olson Kundig Architects' Seattle Storefront | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World 

Alpha One Labs co-founder Sean Auriti and a group of like-minded hackers have launched a campaign to build Hackert0wn, a Brooklyn hackerspace the likes of which the world has never seen. As planned, Hackert0wn will be an  entire hacker ecosystem complete with retail shops stocked with spare parts, sleeping pods, a gym that feeds power back into the building, a co-working space, private offices, a cafe with a coffee dispensing robot, a dumpling shop, an aquaponic farm that raises fish and produce for nearby residents and restaurants, and a state-of-the art CNC machine shop. Oh, and all the buildings will be built out of recycled shipping containers.

Mathematicians have now visualized abstract mathematical objects called flat tori - items resembling donuts with corrugated, fractal surfaces. These were thought to be impossible to envision in ordinary 3-D space... until now.

In addition to a high-tech grocery cart and an augmented-reality mirror, one of the futuristic projects on display at Microsoft's TechForum event earlier this week was a research project exploring the possibilities for using a transparent LCD display in conjunction with a Kinect sensor to let people interact with virtual objects in a 3D space by moving their hands around behind the screen.

If the Space Race characterized the twentieth century, it's possible the Teleportation Race may characterize the twenty-first. Scientists all over the world are trying to perfect teleportation techniques, for a wide variety of applications including communications technology. (Sorry, this isn't the kind of teleportation that involves sending you through a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy.) And now, a group of researchers led by Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai have published a paper on ArXiv describing how they teleported entangled photons over a distance of 97 kilometres across a lake in China.

What could be better than the solar system set to music in a near-perpetual homage to Bach? Little, but a three-movement choral suite inspired by Carl Sagan might be it - a magnificent mashup of Sagan's timeless words set to harmonizing voices and an awe-inspiring montage of space exploration footage. Here's to cosmic goosebumps, courtesy of Canadian composer and teacher Kenley Kristofferson.

A few months back, we talked about the challenges faced by libraries in the era of ebooks, digital information and shrinking budgets. An emerging idea, now being pioneered at one New York state library, is to offer 3D printing facilities to enable constituents to develop and innovate new ideas and products. The Fayetteville Free Library of Fayetteville, NY recently has assumed a new mission in efforts to serve its constituencies with 3D printing facilities. The "FFL Fab Lab" is a space set aside with 3D printing technology, which seeks to encourage innovation and learning of the concept. At the foundation of the FFL's Fab Lab will be a MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D printer, donated to the library. The Fab Lab's 3D printer uses plastic as its raw material.

Proposed Q&A site for operators of 3D printers, heads of hacker spaces, hardware hackers, service bureau owners, MakerBot tinkerers, product entrepreneurs, MAKE magazine subscribers, and all others who want to make physical things with computers.

Science-themed e-books and mobile apps are beginning to account for a significant segment of the digital marketplace - and that segment is growing. But as the supply of ebooks/apps about science continues to swell, it is becoming increasingly difficult to not only keep tabs on new releases, but to determine which releases are worthy of your attention - let alone your hard-earned cash, or the space on your phone/tablet/reader's hard drive.

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.

As summer blockbuster season kicks into high gear, big-budget action movies like The Avengers, Battleship, and Prometheus remind us that there's one thing that unites Americans: Our shared fear of an alien attack. They also remind us that when the invading space fleet arrives, humanity is not going to surrender without a fight to our intergalactic invaders. Instead, we will band together to fight off their incredibly advanced weaponry with our ... well, with what, exactly? Are we really ready to battle our would-be alien overlords?