A newly-reconstructed deformed fossil skull suggests that our human ancestors probably cared for deformed offspring for years. The skull indicates that the human to which it belonged about 530,000 years ago would have been severely handicapped — and yet survived at least five years and possibly several years longer. That suggests that the child’s parents must have provided the child with care,... 

It’s taken 10 years, but Richard Jenkins has at long last achieved his dream of setting the land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle. The British engineer climbed into the land yacht he calls the Ecotricity Greenbird and peeled off a 126.1-mph run across a California desert Thursday to take his place in the record books. His record-setting dash eclipsed the previous benchmark, which American... 

Electric cars have been getting a lot of buzz lately, but a more immediately viable transportation fuel of the future could be liquid derived from coal. Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. The advance makes scaling up the environmentally unfriendly fuel more economical than greener alternatives. If oil prices rise... 

For the first time, scientists were able to track an asteroid from space to the ground and recover pieces of it. The bits are unlike anything ever found on Earth. The asteroid was spotted entering Earth’s atmosphere over Sudan in October and was believed to have fully disintegrated, but an international team found almost 280 pieces of meteorite in a 11-square-mile section of Sudan’s Nubian... 

Have you ever taken a look at a Super Nintendo console and pondered the toaster-like slot in the top? Or contemplated an actual toaster, wondering what would happen if you slotted in a game cartridge? Well, so did hacker richdaluz but, unlike all you lazy-bones readers, he did something about it. Behold! The Super Nintoaster. The mod is a fully functioning Super Nintendo (although it has some glitches... 

Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano is erupting explosively for a fifth time since 10:38 p.m. local time Sunday evening (2:38 a.m. Eastern time). The U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Volcano Observatory estimates the initial explosion sent ash up to 50,000 feet in the air. The ash appears to be heading north away from Anchorage. Alaska Airlines has canceled flights, according to the Associated Press. Redoubt... 

An underwater volcano exploded near Tonga in the South Pacific to stunning effect this week. The pictures of gas and steam erupting out of the surface of the water captivated the world. Here at Wired Science, we love volcanoes — so we decided to use the Tongan eruption to round up some of our favorite volcano eruption pics and present them as big. Above, you can see Mt. Cleveland in Alaska erupting... 

A new battery material that recharges 100 times faster than the lithium-ion in your laptop has been revealed by researchers at MIT. The discovery could lead to cellphone-sized batteries that could be charged in 10 seconds. “The ability to charge and discharge batteries in a matter of seconds rather than hours may open up new technological applications and induce lifestyle changes,” wrote... 

Behold the mesmerizing mundanity of space! NASA has transformed the external camera on the International Space Station into a live webcam — and the view is fascinatingly dull. For its inaugural morning, the webcam showed a live space walk by US Commander Mike Fincke and Russian flight engineer Yury Lonchakov complete with commentary from an announcer (“That’s Fincke in the red stripes”).... 

Screenshots The Digg Toolbar for Firefox lets you Digg, submit content, and keep track of Digg even when you’re not on the Digg site itself. With a notification window built into the toolbar, you’ll never miss a popular story or when friends Digg, submit, or comment on stories. Install the Toolbar Using the Toolbar When you’re browsing the web, the toolbar will let you know if... 

The growing sphere of space junk surrounding the Earth is a hazard to spaceflight, as International Space Station astronauts found out Thursday when their home was buzzed by a five-inch piece of debris. As the story about the near miss was unfolding this morning, Twitter users quickly made a provisional claim about where the debris came from by examining space junk data visualized on Google Earth.... 

For those of you disappointed to learn that cow tipping is just an urban legend, take heart: you can tell tall tales about how you once demagnetized a cow. Satellite images of cattle and deer herds suggest that low-frequency magnetic fields disrupt the tendency of four-legged animals to align their bodies with geomagnetic fields. When herds stand next to power lines, which emit a mild electromagnetic... 

10. Narcissus These cheerful yellow and white harbingers of spring, aka daffodils and jonquils, are actually mildly toxic if the bulbs are eaten in large quantities (Narcissus pseudonarcissus is shown). Some people confuse them for onions. Daffodil bulb diners tend to experience nausea, vomiting, cramps and diarrhea. A doctor might recommend intravenous hydration and/or drugs to stave off nausea... 

Peking man—the group of early humans whose 1920s discovery gave a big boost to the theory of evolution—lived hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believed, a new study says. Some researchers believe the discovery hints at two separate migrations of Homo erectus (of which Peking man is a subspecies) out of Africa: one into northeastern China and another into Southeast Asia. The... 

Rick Simpson and the crew at Evo Design Solutions know a thing or two about speed, having worked on grand-prix motorcycles and Le Mans race cars. Now they’re applying that expertise to a race-ready electric motorcycle as unusual as it is innovative. Everything about the EV-0 RR seems to break from traditional motorcycle design: the carbon-fiber monocoque chassis, the forkless single-sided front... 

While he may not want to suck your blood, the male fish seen above does sport spooky-looking fangs that have earned it the name Danionella dracula. Researchers at London’s Natural History Museum found several of the new species (bottom) in a tank of aquarium fish. Initially museum staff had thought the 0.7-inch-long (1.7-centimeter-long) creatures, caught in Myanmar (Burma), were part of an... 

The iPod Chimera for 2010 comes standard with 500gig or 1TB of memory. It’s made of Titanium and scratch/smear resistant touch screen display. It runs on OS-mmX, Bluetooth V4. Wi-Fi/WiMax, Hi-Def screen resolution of 1280×720, works vertically or horizontally. Wireless stereo earphones supplied by Shure. USB4 connectors with auto-locking mechanism. Options: 4GSM iPhone, Two-way iSight,... 

Until last December, no one had ever seen the bottom of the Tasman Fracture, a trench that drops more than four kilometers below the surface of the ocean. A group of Australian and American researchers recently spent a month hundreds of kilometers southwest of the Tasmanian coast, exploring the fracture’s depths. Jess Adkins, a professor at Caltech and one of the project’s lead scientists,... 

The Blue Brain Project Scientists rely on computer models to understand the toughest concepts in science: the origin of the universe, the behavior of atoms, and the future climate of the planet. Now a computer model is being designed to take on the human brain. Neuroscientist Henry Markram of the Brain Mind Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, has spent the last... 

1. Bring a pillow. Fall asleep (or pretend to) until the last 15 minutes. Wake up, say “oh gee, better get cracking,” and scribble furiously. Turn it in a few minutes early. 2. Get a copy of the exam, run out screaming “Andre, Andre, I’ve got the secret documents!” 3. If it is a math or science exam, answer in essay form. If it is long answer or essay exam, answer with...