Mind Sports has created arguably the most expensive and advanced tournament Scrabble system in the world. It's set to be unveiled at the Prague Mind Sports Festival next month and is a tech-lovers dream. It cost over $25,000 to produce because it utilizes custom-built RFIDs to read the entire Scrabble board almost instantaneously (974 milliseconds), transmitting the information via software to viewers online.

In the Journal of Minimal Access Surgery, a case report details a 46-year-old physically fit female with a history of excessive bleeding and benign growths on her uterus. Her surgery was performed through a two inch-long incision in the belly button, the thinnest part of the abdomen, using the robotic arms in a "chopstick" fashion, said Dr. John R. Lue, Chief of the Medical College of Georgia Section of General Obstetrics and Gynecology at Georgia Health Sciences University, showing that the precision and three-dimensional view provided by robots can enable essentially scar-free surgery for some women needing hysterectomies

Want to help unlock the secrets of magnetism at the molecular scale without getting a PhD in physics? A citizen science project entitled Feynman’s Flowers lets volunteers from across the world analyze microscope images of individual molecules, which have characteristic flower shapes. Anyone can take part, and only a few clicks of the computer mouse are required to collect valuable information.

It's election day in America, which means by midnight up to 47 percent of the USA will have tremendous cerebral pressure and a conviction the country is ruined.

It's unknown why cerebral pressure in certain people suddenly increases but the consequences are better understood: The blood circulation is disrupted and after a while parts of the brain may die off, similar to what occurs in a stroke.  And dementia.

An experimental device converts kinetic energy from beating hearts into electricity than can power a pacemaker, meaning the chance for no more batteries in the future, according to a talk at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2012.

The study is preliminary but a piezoelectric approach is promising for pacemakers because they require only small amounts of power to operate. Batteries must be replaced every five to seven years, which is costly and inconvenient.  Piezoelectricity might also power other implantable cardiac devices like defibrillators, which also have minimal energy needs.

OpenStreetMap, an alternative to Google map data, has had a lot of success but can't agree on what direction to go next, say those in the know. An odd problem for people who make maps, right?

But at least they are having fun trying. 

When I was young, the only sort-of controversy in maps was 'fairness' to third world countries.  We didn't say 'developing nations' back then, we said 'third world', just like people who were trying to foment dissent in a country were called 'fifth columnists' but now we call them 'humanities professors'.

Advanced sensors that monitor extreme pressure and temperature in underground caverns used to store carbon dioxide might be on their way.

CO2 emitted from the combustion of fossil fuels has long been an environmental issue, it represents 84 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2010 analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency. Officials see capturing CO2 emitted by industrial producers like power plants as one possible tool in the fight against climate change. The technique, called carbon capture and sequestration, pumps the captured greenhouse gas into cavities up to two kilometers below the Earth’s surface.