Forty years ago, in December of the troubled year of 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders piloted the Apollo 8 spacecraft into orbit around the moon, the first humans ever to circle any globe but our own. From that unique vantage, they sent back the iconic photograph (taken by Anders) shown below, known as “Earthrise.” It unforgettably captured the fragile beauty of our living planet as it hovered in stark contrast over ...

You cannot plug your laptop into an electrical outlet or recharge your cell phone, iPod or cordless tools without each item’s custom DC adapter. Wouldn’t it be handy if one little black brick covered them all? “My family has 42 DC devices in our house,” says Frank P. Paniagua, Jr., founder and CEO of Green Plug in San Ramon, Calif. “We have adapters and wires everywhere. Instead we could have a single brick in each ...

Fishermen in the village of Maruata, which is located on the Mexican Pacific coast 18 degrees north of the equator, have no electricity. But for the past 16 years they have been able to store their fish on ice: Seven ice makers, powered by nothing but the scorching sun, churn out a half ton of ice every day.There's a global scramble to drive down emissions of carbon dioxide: the electricity to power just refrigerators in ...

Three red snakelike devices bobbing in the waves three miles (4.8 kilometers) off the coast of Agucadoura, Portugal, represent the first swell of what developers hope will be a rising tide of wave power projects. Edinburgh-based Pelamis Wave Power, Ltd., (PWP) has since September been working with asset management firm Babcock & Brown, energy provider Energias de Portugal, and Efacec (a Portugese maker of electromechanical devices) on the Agucadoura project. This first phase will cost ...

The steady rise of digital cameras has prompted the rapid growth of a new industry: instant photographic developing. A shutterbug brings her camera’s memory stick to a store, inserts it into a kiosk, selects the photographs she wants, and moments later prints drop into a chute. The machines seem to be everywhere. “In five years the number of digital kiosks has skyrocketed to 85,000 worldwide,” says Charles S. Christ, Jr., thermal systems director at Eastman ...

As a professor, a software developer and an author I've spent a career in software security. I decided to conduct an experiment to see how vulnerable people's accounts are to mining the Web for information. I asked some of my acquaintances, people I know only casually, if with their permission and under their supervision I could break into their online banking accounts. After a few uncomfortable pauses, some agreed. The goal was simple: get into ...