US academics and researchers have worked out how to make energy savings of around 50%, by delaying data flowing into a network by just a few milliseconds.
"Flammable ice" or methane hydrates, could be the world's last great source of carbon-based fuel - assuming the methane can be mined from the crystal lattices of ice that trap it beneath ocean beds and permafrost.
A team at the University of Washington wants to marshal swarms of good computers to neutralize the bad ones. They say their plan would be cheap to implement and could cope with botnets of any size.
Apart from the human devastation, a small-scale nuclear war between India and Pakistan would destroy much of the ozone layer, leaving the DNA of humans and other organisms at risk of damage from the Sun's rays, say researchers.
NASA engineers are testing out a giant, six-legged robot that could pick up and move a future Moon base thousands of kilometers across the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to explore much more than just the area around their landing site.
If an elevator stretching from Earth into space could ever be built, it could slash the cost of space travel. But a controversial new study suggests that building and maintaining one would be an even bigger challenge than previously thought, because it would need to include built-in thrusters to stabilise itself against dangerous vibrations.
A recently declassified US Army report on the biological effects of non-lethal weapons reveals outlandish plans for "ray gun" devices, which would cause artificial fevers or beam voices into people's heads.
As if forecasting whether asteroids will hit the Earth wasn't hard enough, it now seems that primordial black holes could surprise us by nudging a rock or two our way.
A lick of solar-power paint could see the roofs and walls of warehouses and other buildings generate electricity from the sun, if research by UK researchers pays off. The scientists are developing a way to paint solar cells onto the steel sheets commonly used to clad large buildings.
Governments around the world are rushing to develop military robots capable of killing autonomously without considering the legal and moral implications, warns a leading roboticist. But another robotics expert argues that robotic soldiers could perhaps be made more ethical than human ones.