Horizon highlights – New dimensions edition
Our regular roundup of sci-tech stories from across the Web includes: Itty-bitty city cars, baseball cards that come to life, and how to get the TV shows you want without paying for cable. Let’s kick it off:
Micro mobiles: MIT inching closer to making CityCars a reality on wheels
"The stackable cars hatched at an MIT lab over the past three years seem more like a utopian vision – and a mind-blowing conversation starter – than real life. But the school is closer than you might think, much closer, to moving them to the road." [via Boston Globe]
Cable-free: Dreaming of cutting the subscription-TV cord
"The economy is in the toilet, and I know I'm not the only person in America who is looking for ways to cut costs. Top on my list in 2009 is finding a way to eliminate my $100-a-month cable TV bill. Up until very recently, the idea of cutting off subscription TV would have meant skimping on a whole lot of good-quality entertainment. But thanks to that wonderful communications network known as the Internet and the fact that big Hollywood studios and TV networks have finally realized that digital distribution is actually a good thing, cable-cord cutters, like me, won't have to sacrifice that much or anything at all, depending on what movies and TV programs we like to watch." [via CNET]
Political science: On science, Obama puts his mouth where his money is
"In addition to ending a ban on stem cell research funding, President Barack Obama issued a potentially landmark memo Monday declaring a new era of 'scientific integrity' across government." [via Wired Science]
Green Web: Al Gore joins call for new ‘.eco’ Internet domain
"Al Gore and his group, the Alliance for Climate Protection, have joined forces with Dot Eco LLC to call for a new top-level domain for environmental websites." [via CSM Bright Green blog]
New dimension: Webcam brings 3-D to baseball cards
"Since the 1950s, Topps has sold baseball trading cards filled with photos and stats, bringing the game to life. Now the company is bringing its cards to life." [via NYTimes]
Creative cartography: Map of science looks like Milky Way
"The pursuit of human knowledge has a shape. By crunching data from more than a billion user interactions on scholarly databases, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers produced a high-resolution map of the relationships between different fields of science." [via Wired Science]
