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An Army sergeant on Tuesday sued the makers of Oscar-nominated film "The Hurt Locker" five days before the Academy Awards, claiming the central character in the film is based on him. Master Sergeant Jeffrey S. Sarver believes screenwriter Mark Boal based "virtually all of the situations" in the film on events involving him and claims he coined the phrase "the hurt locker," according to a statement from lawyer Geoffrey Fieger in Southland, Michigan, who is representing Sarver.

"Video: A new way to unfold the Earth's surface produces a new kind of map A new technique for unpeeling the Earth's skin and displaying it on a flat surface provides a fresh perspective on geography, making it possible to create maps that string out the continents for easy comparison, or lump together the world's oceans into one huge mass of water surrounded by coastlines. See a gallery of the new maps "Myriahedral projection" was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. "The basic idea is surprisingly simple," says van Wijk. His algorithms divide the globe's surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares. Cartographers have tried this trick before; van Wijk's innovation is to up the number of polygons from just a few to thousands. He has coined the word "myriahedral" to describe it, a combination of "myriad" with "polyhedron", the name for polygonal 3D shapes. Warping reality The mathematical impossibility of flattening the surface of a sphere has long troubled mapmakers. "Consider peeling an orange and trying to flatten it out," says van Wijk. "The surface has to distort or crack." Some solutions distort the size of the continents while roughly preserving their shape - the familiar Mercator projection, for instance, makes Europe and North America disproportionately large compared with Africa. Others, like the Peters projection, keep landmasses at the correct relative sizes, at the expense of warping their shapes. An ideal map would combine the best properties of both, but that is only possible by inserting gaps into the Earth's surface, resulting in a map with confusing interruptions. Van Wijk's method makes it possible to direct those cuts in a way that minimises such confusion. Maps of significance When generating a map he assigns a "weighting" to each edge on the polyhedron to signal its importance, influencing the pl

A Welsh company developing the technology, which uses an electrical current to stimulate chemicals to produce light, has been awarded a £454,000 grant from the Carbon Trust to help get it into homes, business and on the roads. The organic light emitting diodes (OLED) technology, which can be coated onto a thin flexible film to cover walls like wallpaper, can also be used for flat screen televisions, computers and mobile phone displays.

Five giant billboards have been removed from buildings in Hollywood near the site of the Academy Awards after Los Angeles prosecutors charged four people and four companies with hanging the so-called supergraphics illegally.

Green-er MACHINES By Marci Blackman Photos by Ed Glazar In a four hundred square foot studio in Red Hook, the hinterland of Brooklyn, a botanist, an engineer, anthropologist and bike messenger mental away the hours putting the finishing touches on a bicycle that could save the world. Okay, maybe not the whole world. Perhaps not even a block of it. And twenty-somethings Justin Aguinaldo and Sean Murray would probably never refer to themselves as an anthropologist and botanist even though bike messenger Aguinaldo majored in anthropology in college, and Murray once taught the plant science to children with learning disabilities at the Churchill School in Manhattan. Mostly, along with Marty Odlin of Columbia University's Earth Institute (our engineer), they are a brainy trio of bike geeks who-like the rest of us-get excited over things like black-rimmed wheels with matching black spokes and black high flange hubs, gear ratios, and lightweight composites. And none of them is ever likely to profess that he could save the world. But the bicycle the three are developing along with the streamlining of its manufacturing process could help put a dent in a few of our problems: rural world poverty, health and well-being, greenhouse gases. Plus, as a bonus, they might even win the awesome wicked cool award while doing it.

"LG does more than just manufacture gadgetry - it sponsored the "Life's Good" FilmFest, a filmmaking contest with the goal of showing off the company's HDTVs. This masterpiece, entitled Nuit Blanche (White Night) by director Arev Manoukian, won the contest's $100,000 grand prize, announced January 28, 2010. After you've savored this exquisite work of art, if you want to ruin the illusion by finding out how this surreal world was created, click through for a demonstration of the technology behind its making. Keep in mind, though - all the technology in the world is no substitute for talent."

Federal authorities have charged a trendy Santa Monica sushi restaurant with serving whale meat -- an investigation that was spurred by the team behind the Oscar-winning documentary, "The Cove." Prosecutors charged Typhoon Restaurant Inc., the parent company of The Hump, and one of its chefs -- Kiyoshiro Yamamoto, 45 -- with the illegal sale of a marine mammal product for an unauthorized purpose. While it is considered a delicacy in Japan and some other countries, meat from whale -- an endangered species -- is illegal to consume in the United States.