Members of the Research Group Baubotanik at the Institute of Theory of Modern Architecture and Design (University of Stuttgart) have been focusing on the idea of living plant constructions - that's right, towers made from trees.

Recently their first “baubotanical” tower made of living trees was completed - though it isn't quite mature yet. Their prototype 'building' is located in the south of Germany and is nearly 9 meters high with a base area of approximately 8 square meters.

It's basically the Keep On The Borderlands, except green.

Worried that your cold revenge plans won't come to fruition before you shake off that mortal coil? A new Web site, www.DeathRiskRankings.com, developed by researchers and students at Carnegie Mellon University, says they can help you plan your schedule accordingly.

The tool allows users to query publicly available data from the United States and Europe, and compare mortality risks by gender, age, cause of death and geographic region.

Sherlock Holmes used a variety of tools to deduce what he needed to know about people in general and criminals in specific. It turns out he could learn a lot by how people act in a virtual reality setting playing a form of 'hide and seek', say two University of Alberta researchers.

Experimental psychologist Marcia Spetch and computer scientist Vadim Bulitko recently published an article in Learning and Motivation say they mapped the decision-making process involved in hiding and searching for objects, which could obviously lead to more realistic game environments and even new tools for law enforcement.

Stanford scientists say they will reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an 'open-source' digital camera.

If the technology catches on, camera performance will be no longer be limited by the software that comes pre-installed by the manufacturer because virtually all of the features of the Stanford camera – focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc – are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere. "The premise of the project is to build a camera that is open source," said computer science professor Marc Levoy.

Microbloggers are having trouble being interesting, a new study says. So they write more often, just to have something to say. The top 5 most frequent postings on microblogging sites like Twitter, Jaiku and Mobile Facebook are “working,” “home,” “work,” “lunch,” and “sleeping”. Hardly the stuff that would seem enchanting to most - and it isn't. Most newcomers drop out soon after registering.

The moon has no has no atmosphere like Earth's but oxygen which can be used for people, growing food, creating water and even burning rocket fuel is trapped in its soil.

You may feel like you're not in the same league as Albert Einstein or Charles Darwin (note: statistically, you are not) but you probably share one thing if you are reading this article; patterns of correspondence.

A new Northwestern University study of human behavior says that people who wrote letters in olden days using pen and paper did so in a pattern similar to the way people use e-mail today. The study in Science seeks to find the similarity of these two seemingly different activities, with the underlying pattern of human activity linking letters and e-mails.

SentForever are letting people transmit free messages into deep space through their Web site to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

So you can send a message to extraterrestrials at the speed of light, some 670 million miles per hour. Mapping its progress is cooler than anything you will write in the message.

After 8 minutes the messages pass by the sun and 5 1/2 hours later pass Pluto. In 14 hours the messages overtake the Voyager 1 probe, the most distant man-made object from Earth, launched by NASA in September 1977.

When we were kids, you could do stupid things and, if you absolutely needed them to be left behind, you moved away and never spoke to your old friends again. Now stupid things end up on YouTube. Forever.

What if you don't want your college-era rants showing up in a job interview?

University of Washington researchers say they have developed a way to make online information expire. After a set time period, electronic communications such as e-mail, Facebook posts and chat messages would automatically self-destruct, becoming irretrievable from all Web sites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers. Not even the sender could retrieve them.

A group called the Blind Driver Challenge team in Virginia Tech's Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory has retrofitted a four-wheel dirt buggy with laser range finders, an instant voice command interface and a host of other cutting-edge technologies.

Does it sound like Knight Rider's KITT or something out of a Terminator movie? Only if those drivers are blind.

It's still in the early testing stage but the National Federation of the Blind considers the vehicle a major breakthrough for independent living of the visually impaired.