New smartphones from Apple, Nokia, Samsung and others are poised to hit the market in time for the holiday buying season. Come January there will be a lot of obsolete gadgets looking for new homes. Some of these devices will make their way to retail buy-back and trade-in programs while others will be shipped to [...]

With the specter of Apple’s iPhone 5 introduction looming on September 12, gadget makers pressed for their share of the consumer electronics spotlight this week. The most prominent devices on display: Nokia’s first Windows Phone 8 smartphones and several new Motorola Droids running Google Android. Even Amazon made a play on Thursday to preempt next [...]

Almost all lead is recycled, among the only elements on the periodic table to earn that distinction. With good reason, mind you: the soft metal is a potent neurotoxic known to impact children’s brain development, among other nasty health effects. Today, nearly all lead is used in batteries (though it was once put into gasoline, [...]

My coffee habit is killing the black-handed spider monkey, a cute New World simian (my favorite kind) that thrives in the canopy of Central American forests with tall trees. That’s pretty much the opposite of the kinds of forests that still exist where the spider monkey lives, because for decades we’ve been cutting down those [...]

For more than 150 years New York City’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (more commonly called The Cooper Union) has finished its school years with an annual event  showcasing student projects in the areas of art, architecture and engineering. Of the more than 300 projects on display this year were several [...]