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from E Magazine --
Rental car companies large and small have responded to increased consumer demand for fuel efficiency in the last few years by stocking up on gasoline-electric hybrids and other vehicles with better mileage and lower emissions. Hertz sparked the trend in 2006 when it launched its Green Collection, which included thousands of fuel efficient cars such as the Toyota Camry, Ford Fusion, Buick LaCrosse and Hyundai Sonata. Meanwhile, other companies are towing the line as well. Avis and its partner Budget offer 2,500 Toyota’s Prius and Nissan’s Altima for rent in the U.S. And Advantage Rent-a-Car, a smaller but up-and-coming player in the industry, has pledged to turn 100 percent of its rental fleet “green” by 2010. Not to be outdone, Enterprise—the nation’s largest rental car company offers 5,000 hybrids, while another 73,000 can run on the ethanol-based biofuel or on regular gas.

Of course, green car rentals do come with a premium. Renting a hybrid typically costs $5 to $15 more per day. In order to encourage greener rentals despite the cost premium, San Francisco International Airport now offers travelers a $15 credit if they rent a hybrid from any of the companies operating there.
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From New Scientist--

At the recent first conference on Artificial General Intelligence, many of the speakers were preparing for a world in which machines could think like humans. One the conference's most intriguing attendees, Peter Voss, says his company Adaptive AI has launched the world's first commercial artificial general intelligence. It's an "interactive voice response system - a telephone robot like those you may have battled with in an effort to pay a bill or find your bank balance. Voss freely admits his creation is far short of a human's abilities, but it is much smarter than other "dumb" phonebots, he says. You can talk almost as naturally as you would to a real person. For example, Voss says the system can use its ability to track the flow and sense of the conversation to work out who a pronoun - such as she or you - is referring to. The system will also infer if the line goes dead mid-conversation, and phone the caller back, rewinding to the "mental state" it was before the disconnection. The defining feature of an AGI is that you don't have to program it to do specific tasks - instead it is capable of taking on a wide range of very different problems and learning as it goes. AGIs are typically built on a "knowledge base" of information about the world that most humans take for granted: for example, the fact that the physical world is filled with objects and living things, and that all people have a known age and name, but that objects often do not. This brain is for sale with a tag of $30,000. It can also be rented for about 20 cents a minute.
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and from National Geographic --

A potentially "immortal" jellyfish species that can age backward—the Benjamin Button of the deep—is silently invading the world's oceans, swarm by swarm, a recent study says. Like the Brad Pitt movie character, the immortal jellyfish transforms from an adult back into a baby, but with an added bonus: Unlike Benjamin Button, the jellyfish can do it over and over again—though apparently only as an emergency measure. About as wide as a human pinky nail when fully grown, the immortal jelly was discovered in the Mediterranean Sea in 1883. But its unique ability was not discovered until the 1990s. It typically reproduces the old-fashioned way, by the meeting of free-floating sperm and eggs. And most of the time they die the old-fashioned way too. But when starvation, physical damage, or other crises arise, "instead of sure death, they transform all of their existing cells into a younger state," said Maria Pia Miglietta, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University. The jellyfish turns itself into a bloblike cyst, which then develops into a polyp colony, essentially the first stage in jellyfish life, and near perfect copies of the original adult.

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