News.com Extra

It's languished for a while, but Rob Galbraith's extremely useful and detailed database of performance tests on CompactFlash and SD media has just been updated. If you've got burning questions about whether it's worth the extra bucks for a flashier flash card, this is the place to look. Recent additions include tests with the Canon EOS 40D and Nikon D300.

So how do you think your favorite baseball team will fare in 2008? New Jersey Institute of Technology's Bruce Bukiet has some fodder for the baseball buffs among us.

For the past seven seasons, Bukiet has been using a mathematical model to predict how many games each Major League Baseball team is likely to win. The Mets fan sees his team edging the Braves in the NL East divisional race, with 92 wins. In the AL East, Bukiet's formula has the Yankees and Red Sox both finishing up with 98 victories.

Of course, like any of the countless baseball predictions made each year, Bukiet's should probably be take with a grain of salt. Bukiet had an off year in 2007, correctly picking only two clear Division winners. That's something to give, say a Giants fan like yours truly, some hope. My beloved San Francisco team is pegged as the NL West cellar dweller with just 75 wins.

Check out Bruce Bukiet's predictions in LiveScience: "Study Predicts Baseball's Top Teams in 2008"

Shanghai developers plan to begin construction next year on what they say will be the world's first sustainable "eco-city" on a plot almost the size of Manhattan. The Dongtan, or East Beach, project is to be built on Chongming Island and is slated to eventually support half a million residents.

Among other things, the city is envisioned to recycle almost all of its waste, produce its electricity, and ferry people around in hydrogen fuel-cell buses and solar-powered water taxis, according to The Seattle Times

But amid high hopes, there is fear that the environmental project will end up as "another grand idea that failed in practice."

Read the story at The Seattle Times: "Can a bold new "eco-city" clear the air in China?"

(Credit: VisBox)

It used to be that if you wanted to get a good look at microscopic bits of matter, you had to have to use, well, a microscope. You'd smoosh a drop of liquid between two small glass plates, slip them under the lens, and then fiddle with the focus until the mitochondria -- hopefully -- came into view. At least, that's how it was in my high school biology class way back when (and never mind those film strips).

Things are different if you're a scientific researcher at a 21st-century institution of higher learning. Take the Tufts University School of Engineering, which has the luxury of a $350,000 scientific display device called the VisWall, from company called VisBox, that casts molecules and more into eye-popping 3D relief on an 8-by-14-foot screen. In flat-screen mode, it's said to be twice as sharp as an HDTV--just the thing for studying the inner workings of the colon, apparently.

Read more from The Boston Globe: "Plasma TV has nothing on this visionary virtual device"

Scientists in Germany believe they have discovered how humans are able to filter out unimportant noise in order to zoom in on that single voice they want to hear.

Neuroscientist Holger Schulze and his colleagues think the brain's auditory system probably sorts different sources of sound based on their unique pitch and suppresses less important ones.

The scientists conducted experiments on gerbils, which have a similar hearing mechanism to humans, reports Live Science.

Read the story at Live Science: "Party trick: How we hear one voice amid many"

In the wake of science fiction great Arthur C. Clarke's passing last week at the age of 90, Popular Mechanics' Erik Sofge examines 10 futuristic movies that "got the science right, or will sometime soon."

Read more at Popular Mechanics: "The 10 most prophetic sci-fi movies ever"

It's not exactly Gershwin's "An American in Paris," but there is one thing very significant about an archaic 10-second recording discovered earlier this month in the City of Lights by a group of American audio historians: it is the earliest known sound recording. The phonoautograph of the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was made in 1860, some 17 years before the advent of Thomas Edison's phonograph. And get this: it was a visual tool, not an audio one. Still, scientists figured out how to make it play.

Read more at The New York Times: "Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison"

The 2010 census was supposed to be the first truly high-tech headcount, with workers going door-to-door with handheld computers to collect and transmit data and to verify every address.

Now, despite billions of dollars earmarked for what would also be the most expensive census to date, technology problems have officials considering a return to pencil and paper counting, according to the Associated Press.

Read the AP story on CNN: "Fancy computers spell trouble for 2010 census"

It's as much a part of the school experience as homework, cliques, and senioritis: the fund-raiser. In the Internet era, however, things aren't what they used to be: the quest for funds to supplement the never-quite-enough out of state and city coffers is no longer limited to car washes and bake sales. Nowadays, booster groups and administrators are turning to online auctions--$275 for a private pole-dancing lesson, anyone?--with the potential to rake in more than ever before and to avoid too-blatant competition among neighbors.

Read more at The Boston Globe: "Boosters turning to online auctions"

What do Princess Leia headphones, a Darth Vader gumball machine, and a Jabba the Hutt beanbag chair have in common? They're all Star Wars promotional merchandise rejects you won't be finding on eBay anytime soon.

NPR's The Bryant Park Project caught up with Jason Geyer and Steve Ross, two product designers tapped to create merchandise for the Star Wars "prequels" back in the late 1990s.

Some of their products worked, and some, like the Han Solo refrigerator, bombed. Read the story and check out the audio slideshow at NPR: "Rejected: 'Star Wars' merchandise you'll never own"