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Smart News / Smart News Ideas & Innovations

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The Earliest Bike Design Is Getting a Modern, Electric Reboot

What would early bike designers think of this Tron-like reboot of their classic wheels?

This Drone Hunts Down Apple Disease

These drones are striking against a different kind of enemy: apple scab

Dell Laptop Users Weren’t Crazy, Their Keyboards Really Did Smell Like Cat Urine

Some users speculate that polymers could have been to blame, though others pointed to nitrogen, one of the main components of urine

These Scientists Are Using Bees to Spread Pesticides

Since they’re already going to the flowers anyway, why not give them some pesticides to carry?

Lockheed Martin’s networked spy rocks

Networked Rocks Could Let the Military Keep an Ear on the Ground

These rocks can not only spy on you, they can communicate with each other and report back to base

If Anyone Can Make the James Bond Submarine Car Work, It’s Elon Musk

Musk bought the Lotus Espirit car from the movie The Spy Who Loved Me for $866,000 at auction

Glitches in the Common Application Have Seniors Pulling Their Hair Out

Should the Common App fall down entirely, we’ll probably hear the collective wail millions of high school seniors all over the country

The GeoEye-1 satellite

This App Tells You When Satellites Are Watching You

For the paranoid among us, an app that says when you may be being watched

Luke Skywalker’s prosthetic hand from The Empire Strikes Back

Advances in Prosthetic Limbs Brings Back a Sense of Touch

This new prosthetic mimicked rhesus macaques’ sense of touch

This New Burial Technique Turns a Corpse Into a Tiny Pile of Freeze-Dried Fertilizer

In the future wills may include specifications for the type of flower or bush we’d like to fertilize rather than the make of coffin or urn

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Watch Kids From 1962 Try to Build a Flying Bicycle

What kid hasn’t wanted to make their bicycle fly?

An oil well in North Dakota

Thanks to the Gas Boom, America Is Producing More Fuel Than Russia Or Saudi Arabia

This year the U.S. is set to overtake Russia as the world’s largest producer of oil and gas

Your Cheat Sheet to the 2013 Nobel Prizes

Love them or hate them, here we provide you with the sound bytes you’ll need to at least discuss them

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This New Charger Checks To See If Your Phone’s Been Hacked

As your smartphone becomes more important, it also becomes a more appealing target for hackers

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Energy Innovation

This Gadget Charges Your Phone With Fire

A new device uses heat from any fire to produce electricity

This Jetpack Could Carry You Twenty Miles And Be On the Market by Next Year

Pilots will have to wear hearing protection along with a helmet, neck restraints, boots and a fireproof suit

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This Site Shows You Every Face on Facebook

There are over a billion people with Facebook accounts, and this site lets you see all of their profile pictures at once

Lysol’s Vintage Ads Subtly Pushed Women to Use Its Disinfectant as Birth Control

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Lysol isn’t even an effective contraceptive

Britain’s Building a Transportation Network Just for Bees (And Other Pollinators)

The idea is to provide passage for insects that play a role in maintaining an estimated 90 percent of Britain’s greenery and crops through pollination

The iPhone 5s’ home button also serves as a fingerprint scanner.

These Hackers Say They’ve Already Cracked the New iPhone’s Fancy Fingerprint Lock

Hackers say they’ve found a way around the new iPhone’s fingerprint scanner, and it doesn’t sound all that hard

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