Hurricane experts are throwing cold water on an idea backed by billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates aimed at controlling the weather. Gates and a dozen other scientists have raised eyebrows by submitting patent applications for a technology to reduce the danger of approaching hurricanes by cooling ocean temperatures. It's a noble idea, given the horrible memories from Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the Gulf Coast four years ago this week. The storm, which rated a frightening Category 3 when it ...

Many Google users probably didn't notice this month that they can now display their search tips in the Hawaiian language. Wedged between Hausa and Hebrew, Hawaiian is one of more than 125 "interface languages" now available on Google. The list also includes some humorous twists on English, including "pirate," "Klingon" and "Elmer Fudd." But for Hawaiian educators, the addition of Hawaiian is a small step toward legitimizing a language that is considered "critically endangered" by the United Nations. "It's the ...

Three years ago many would have dismissed the notion that a significant supply of the world's automotive fuel could come from algae. But today the idea, while still an adventurous one, is getting much harder to ignore. Back then there were only a handful of companies seriously focused on producing algae fuel. Now there are well over 50, according to Samhitha Udupa, a research associate with Lux Research. The number should double within the next year or two, ...

A glimpse of something shiny on the ocean floor nine years ago led a Welsh diver to uncover a piece of local history that had been forgotten for more than a century.

Thousands of residents fled ahead of a raging wildfire near northern California's Santa Cruz Mountains, and one man said he had an "ominous feeling" as ashes descended on him. Helbard Alkhassadeh traveled down the state's scenic Highway 1 between Davenport and Santa Cruz and submitted images of the blaze, named the Lockheed Fire, to CNN's iReport. "I got to the point where the main plume was going over my head, and it was sprinkling ashes on me," he said. "It's ...

Christina Cimino was logging onto Twitter on Thursday morning when something happened that she found deeply unsettling. "I got some weird error message, and I'm like, 'What's going on!" the 24-year-old said. That error message was the scourge of online social networkers worldwide on Thursday as cyber-attacks shut down Twitter and caused sustained glitches in other social-media sites like Facebook and the blogging site LiveJournal. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote the sites were the victims of what "appears ...

William Borucki was more than a little bit nervous as he watched the Kepler spacecraft lift off from Cape Canaveral last March, and no wonder. It was way back in 1984 that he had first proposed sending up a telescope to search for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars — and after more than two decades of tireless effort, it was finally happening. "In the back of my mind," says the NASA astronomer, "I was imagining this thing going up ...

The swimming of a single jellyfish generates barely a ripple in the world's vast oceans. But what about a bloom of thousands of the creatures? Moving together, could they contribute to the large-scale mixing of ocean waters — the way the winds and tides do — as some scientist have long conjectured? Kakani Katija, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, believes it's possible, based on her recent experiments with jellyfish blooms in a freshwater lake ...

The government's cash-for-clunkers program appears to be working like a charm, so — time to shut it down. Good old Washington! Offering rebates of up to $4,500 to folks trading in their gas guzzlers for new, more fuel-efficient cars, the program has been everything a stimulus package ought to be: a quick and efficient way to spur private-sector spending in support of a worthwhile civic goal. ...

Efforts to curb overfishing in five of the world's marine ecosystems are starting to show signs of working. The news comes from a multi-national study on the status of marine fisheries and ecosystems reported in "Science". While the report found that stock collapse is an increasing international trend, the scientists involved believe there are positive signs that rebuilding the ocean's depleted fish stocks is possible. The two year study looked at ten marine ecosystems, evaluating how much ...