Wood is a great material because it’s cheap, renewable, and versatile. But this crazy transparent wood that scientists in Sweden brewed up is nuts. It could replace glass for some seriously eye-catching architecture, and even be used in cheap solar panels or windows.

California’s high-speed train has just been delayed by three more years. The first leg of the state’s high-speed rail is now set to finish by 2025, not 2022 as planned. This could mean that Hyperloop—the Golden State’s other, even more futuristic transit plan—could beat the bullet train to the station.

The world’s biggest consumer drone maker is back with its smartest compact quadcopter yet: The Phantom 4 automatically dodges obstacles, takes amazing video in all directions, and makes you look like a drone pro—even if you’ve never touched one before.

Just like a supermarket avocado, the squishiness of fertilized human eggs could hint at how healthy and viable their embryos are—which would be a huge benefit for the millions of in-vitro fertilization babies now being born worldwide.

Wi-fi is already a very great thing. Problem is—especially for mobile devices—wi-fi is also an energy suck. But now, scientists have come up with a way of connecting to wi-fi that requires even less energy than a Bluetooth connection.

Estonian defense company Milrem has developed a seriously cool military robot that is totally modular, so that it can easily morph from an unmanned combat unit, to a humanless firefighter, to a makeshift medevac.

Credit cards and passports are filled with microchips brimming with your personal information—and give off radio waves to any nearby sleazebag that wants to steal your identity. A new generation of those chips stands to stop hackers in their tracks.

The most threatening letter of the alphabet is now the new name of Google’s quasi-secret moonshot lab: Google X is now just “X.” Hear that? That’s the sound of paranoid civilians boarding up windows and prepping drone-downing cannons.

Data. It’s a powerful tool that helps us battle climate change or keep companies sustainable. But there’s so much data, and it’s hard to corral, index, and understand. However, one company wants to give Earth a “planetary nervous system” to help out companies and policy makers make faster, more informed decisions…

Living in an apartment building, I can spot about twenty active Wi-Fi networks at a time. And the worst part is that they can all see me, too.

Many of us are pretty happy with touchscreen implementation in products like the iPhone or HTC Touch. But Microsoft (teaming with HTC hardware, at least in this photograph) has developed a new sort of touchscreen that doesn't involve touching the screen at all. Instead, IR beams shoot out from the sides of the phone…