The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel

Actual Factual Jet Pack: VIDEO

At last the future is here. After decades wasted on such frivolous concerns as space travel and attempting to cure cancer, man has realized what is truly important and bent his skills to achieving the ultimate truth: a goddamn jetpack. (The ultimate truth is "Jetpacks are totally sweet" - video inside)

Will U.S. Become the Saudi Arabia of Wind Power?

A new venture called 3Tier Group in Seattle has a goal of no less than “Remapping the World” for alternative energy. T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman, is such a big fan, he used 3Tier’s maps to draw a bold conclusion-that the United States has the potential to be “the Saudi Arabia of Wind.”

3Tier crunches huge amounts of climate data into its computers, and analyzes it in models to come up with an accurate forecast of what kind of power a particular wind farm is going to produce over time. It can also take measurements at a site over a year’s time, and crunch numbers that may spot a better site a few miles away from one the developer originally scoped out, says Kenneth Westrick, the founder and CEO, an atmospheric scientist .

The Daily Flash: Eco, Space, Science (11/26)

Sci-Fi Ray Gun Debuts in Iraq

Everest and Himalayan Glaciers Could Vanish By 2035, Imperiling a Billion People

California To Become The Electric Vehicle Capital of the US

Oceans Growing Acidic 10 Times Faster Than Expected

Vatican set to go green with huge solar panel roof

Cal Scientist: Jupiter Has Core 2X as Big as Thought

Science could soar with world's most powerful rocket

Building the Electron Superhighway

Probe to Scout Earth-Made Blasts

The economic slowdown casts a shadow over the prospects for clean technology

"What Color's Your Spaceship?" The problem with science education

Science is the future.  In case you haven't noticed.  Just this last week we've seen people set up an interplanetary internet, merge nanotech with brain tissue and release plans for a space elevator.  The only thing we really know about the future is that we don't know what the hell it's going to be like, outside of "incredible."  So why are we preparing our kids for the past?

The Dolphin Paradox: New technology helps disprove 72-year-old scientific mystery

In 1936, British zoologist Sir James Gray observed dolphins swimming at a swift rate of more than 20 miles per hour, but his studies had concluded that the muscles of dolphins simply weren't strong enough to support those kinds of speeds. The conundrum came to be known as "Gray's Paradox."

Armed with cutting-edge flow measurement technology, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have tackled the problem and conclusively solved the mystery.

The Daily Flash: Eco, Space, Science (11/25)

Study Increases Fuel Cell Efficiency By 75%

Music Fan Charges iPod With an Onion

Who needs fossil fuels? 3 green power ideas escape the lab

Los Alamos observatory fingers cosmic ray 'hot spots'

Swiss Company to Launch Solar Powered Submarine

Astronaut Invents Zero-G Coffee Cup

Alien-like Squid Filmed at Ultra-Deep Oil-Drilling Site

Return of the Neanderthals

Oceans Ten Times More Acidic Than Thought

Will the next Einstein come from Africa?

“Fish” Machine Turns Ocean Vibrations into Energy

Astronomers and physicists: Are we getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter?

Helsinki's "City Wall" -A Collaborative Social Space

In a practice dating back to ancient Rome and attributed in origin to Julius Caesar, where the Acta Diurna (“daily events”) of political and social events were posted on the city walls, Helsinki, Finland's capital, has launched The CityWall, a large mutli-touch display installed in a central location which acts as a collaborative and playful interface for the city's everchanging media landscape.

Blankets of Soil May Hide Vast Glaciers on Mars

"On Earth such buried glacial ice in Antarctica preserves the record of traces of ancient organisms and past climate history."

James W. Head of Brown University.

Vast Martian glaciers of water ice under protective blankets of rocky debris persist today at much lower latitudes than any ice previously identified on Mars, says new research using ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"Altogether, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that's not in the polar caps. Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles, and up to one-half-mile thick, and there are many more," said John W. Holt of The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, lead author of a report on the radar observations in the Nov. 21 issue of the journal Science.

Malcom Gladwell on "Outliers" -Phenomena that Lead to Extraordinary Success VIDEO

The Future of Food: Will We Be Buying Meals Cultivated in Labs? -A Galaxy Insight

This past spring, the first international In Vitro Meat Symposium was held in Norway. The consensus among scientists seems to be that by the end of the decade we will be buying in vitro beef, pork and chicken that was artificially grown from stem cells in laboratories. They say it’s more humane to eat an animal that never had a head, sort of like eating a meaty vegetable.