Google has launched a patent-search service (). The test version can rifle through 7 million US patents issued before mid-2006, searching by keyword, filing date, issue date, patent number and inventor. Once a patent has been found, users can scroll through its pages and zoom in on images and text.
Ecologists will no longer have to stand out in the cold to count birds and bats. A technique developed by the US Department of Defense for tracking honeybees trained to sniff out landmines can now be used to track and count any flying animal. A laser beam sweeps the…
