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A very cool interactive animation showing the relative sizes of everything from a quark to the known universe.

this is very cool indeed.

When it comes to survival of the fittest, it's sometimes better to be an adaptable tortoise than a fitness-oriented hare, a Michigan State University evolutionary biologist says. In this week's Science magazine, Richard Lenski, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and colleagues show that more adaptable bacteria oriented toward long-term improvement prevailed over competitors that held a short-term advantage.

University of Pennsylvania teaches their PR2 to be able to read in the wild.  Video shows the PR2 roaming the hallways reading from various items sitting around and signs on the wall.  

Doctors can now make a stroke diagnosis using an iPhone/Android app with close to the same accuracy as a diagnosis at a medical computer workstation, researchers from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine have shown in a new study. The Resolution MD Mobile app lets physicians view and manipulate remote medical images in high-resolution 3-D on the iPhone or Android phone, allowing for a quick diagnosis for the treatment of stroke, cardiac arrest, or other emergencies. 

Last Friday was my last day at the White House. As I begin my fellowship at Harvard University, I'd like to share my reflections on public service.  "On a bright February day, the previous morning's dusting of snow melting on the ground, I arrived at a White House that was, as the Washington Post put it, "stuck" in the "Dark Ages of technology." In their words, "If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past." As my team congratulated me on the new job, they handed me a stack of documents with $27 billion worth of technology projects that were years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. At the time, those documents were what passed for real-time updates on the performance of IT projects. My neighbor's ten year old could look up the latest stats of his favorite baseball player on his phone on the school bus, but I couldn't get an update on how we were spending billions of taxpayer dollars while at my desk in the White House. And at the same time, the President of the United States had to fight tooth and nail to simply get a blackberry.  These were symptoms of a much larger problem.

Engineers have developed a device platform that combines electronic components for sensing, medical diagnostics, communications and human-machine interfaces, all on an ultrathin skin-like patch that mounts directly onto the skin with the ease, flexibility and comfort of a temporary tattoo. Led by researcher John A. Rogers, the Lee J. Flory-Founder professor of engineering at the University of Illinois, the researchers described their novel skin-mounted electronics in the Aug. 12 issue of the journal Science.

Research out of Brigham Young University shows that political entries on Wikipedia are quite accurate and reliable locations to get information.