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As a fan of cars, I find that even when I am perfectly happy with my vehicle, I check car lots and classifieds and car-dealer ads. This began in college when I had to drive a car that, let me just say, was not a high-performance vehicle. It got me from point A to point B most of the time, but it always needed work and I never knew when it would break down and leave me stranded. I always dreamed of driving a really nice automobile.

Working at Wolfram Research, I have many times heard the analogy of Mathematica as a high-performance computational engine. The high-performance phrase takes me back to cars and I wondered, what kind of car would Mathematica be? In my mind, it would clearly be something very fast that has a great engine under the hood but is easy to drive. A car I would’ve liked to have had in college. Then I thought about how many students have access to Mathematica, which is much like a college student driving a brand-new sports car. It has more than enough power for most applications, and using it can make you look good.
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A nine-mile-high inflatable tower could offer cheap access to outer space.

Bored with Pearl, the cursing toddler landlord demanding rent money? Not amused by those cutesy pictures of cats with the baby-speak captions? Replenish your list of favorite bookmarks with these 10 new or lesser-known humor Web sites, including some that find comedy in real life.

Scientists begin a search for gravitational waves stemming from the Big Bang.

After a string of real celebrity deaths last week, the Internet killed a few more stars. Despite what you may have read, Jeff Goldblum, Natalie Portman, Britney Spears, Harrison Ford and Rick Astley are alive. Fake news of their deaths flew across social-networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Stephen Wolfram recently received an award for his contributions to computer science. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the speech he gave on that occasion. (The audio version of the original speech is here.)

I want to talk about a big topic here today: the quest for computable knowledge. It’s a topic that spans a lot of history, and that I’ve personally spent a long time working on. I want to talk about the history. I want to talk about my own efforts in this direction. And I want to talk about what I think the future holds.
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Lasers could help the U.S. Navy detect enemy submarines.

The iPhone 3GS is already wooing game developers with its faster, more powerful platform, but don’t expect a ton of games fully taking advantage of it to flood the App Store — yet.

Tiny models suggest the world’s earliest wheeled vehicles were pulled by camels and bulls.

Marble carvings that once adorned the Parthenon were originally coated in blue.