When you're a smoker, quitting is tough. Can high-tech gadgetry make it any easier? I'm Charlie, and I'm addicted to cigarettes. That is, I believe, the way to start talking about a problem. Why am I telling you? Because I'm giving up. Of course, wuss that I am, I'm not going cold turkey. I shall enlist the power of technology to help. Here's a list of the gadgets I will rely on in the coming weeks. The photo, by the way, shows one of Brazil's rather scary anti-smoking warnings. This one concerns the ability of cigarettes to cause impotence.

Medford, Mass.–Wind turbines themselves aren't exactly exotic–thousands of them are already installed around the world. But it is unusual to see a 150-foot-high turbine spinning next to a middle school football field. The City of Medford, Mass., cut the ribbon on a 100-kilowatt wind turbine on Thursday in a ceremony that included speeches from the mayor and a long line of children. It is said to be the first commercial-size wind turbine installed at a public Massachusetts school.

A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluding that the buildup of human-generated greenhouse gases could leave a profound millenniums-long imprint on climate and sea levels, focuses on a characteristic of global warming that the public, and many policymakers, have not absorbed – at least according to John Sterman at M.I.T.

NASA is turning control of the Hubble Space Telescope over to the general public to give non-scientists a chance to choose which target the iconic observatory should turn its camera eyes on next. The U.S. space agency is inviting the public to vote for one of six candidate astronomical objects for Hubble to observe in honor of the International Year of Astronomy, which began this month. The options, which Hubble has not previously photographed, range from far-flung galaxies to dying stars. Votes can be cast until March 1.

Suppliers of home heating oil from Maine to Maryland have agreed to gradually reduce sulfur levels in their oil over the next 10 years in an effort to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, a contributor to haze. The agreement was made with the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast Visibility Union, a planning organization that coordinates efforts to improve air quality to meet the requirements of the Environmental Protection Agency.

During the 20 months that Fisher-Price spent developing the innards and software of its latest animatronic Elmo, engineers gave the project the code name Elmo Live. And sure enough, they made him more animate than ever: He moves his mouth in time with the stories he tells, shivers when he gets scared, and has a fit when he sneezes. When they were finally able to test the doll on children, they were struck by how immediately the kids blocked out all other stimuli in the room and began interacting with Elmo. "It was as if Elmo were part of their family," says Gina Sirard, Fisher-Price VP of marketing. "To a child, he really is alive."

Scientists are working on software that will enable robots to learn. It won’t be long, they say, before personal robots are part of our lives.

Snow that blows and drifts across roadways has long troubled road maintenance crews and commuters alike, creating treacherous driving conditions and requiring additional maintenance resources to mitigate the problem. Now, engineers have developed “SnowMan,” a user-friendly, desktop software package that puts cost-effective solutions to the snow drift problem at the fingertips of highway designers and road maintenance personnel.

For all of you who love riding a bike downhill but prefer to walk uphill, here is a revolutionary new bicycle design that fits in a rucksack! It is actually meant for going mountain hiking uphill, and then wheeling downhill. The name of this new invention is Bergm?nch, which means "mountain monk" in German. Check out the video below, about the monk riding a Bergm?nch, and the image of the folded out bicycle.

Honeybees have the ability to distinguish and remember visual quantities up to four, according to a new study. Researchers demonstrated that honeybees can match patterns containing the same number of icons, even when the icons are of mixed color and shape. This suggests that honeybees possess a basic number sense that was once thought to be exclusive to vertebrates. Researcher Shaowu Zhang says, "There has been a lot of evidence that vertebrates, such as pigeons, dolphins or monkeys, have some numerical competence but we never expected to find such abilities in insects. So far as these very basic skills go, there is probably no boundary between insects, animals and us"