Hasta La Gadget!

Okay, so they’re not exactly cutting edge. But landscapers in Colorado digging a hole for a fish pond in the front yard of a Boulder home last May stumbled onto a cache of old tools—ones that turned out to be 13,000 years old, according to the Associated Press.

The 83 ancient stone tools are believed to have been buried by the Clovis people, ice age hunter-gatherers who remain a puzzle to anthropologists, the report said. The home’s owner even thought they were just a century or two old, but contacted researchers at the University of Colorado just to be sure. The tools are among just a handful found in North America.

So far, researchers determined via biochemical analysis of protein and blood residue on the tools that they were used to kill camels, sheep, horses, and bears. The owner of the house plans to donate most of the tools to a museum, but bury a few back in his yard so that they “stay where they belong,” according to the report.

The odds are high that we’re not alone in the universe. In fact, there may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, a Carnegie Institution astronomer and author of “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets,” in a new CNN report.

Based on the number of “super-Earths,” or planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants such as Jupiter, that have been discovered already among the 330 exoplanets we know of outside the solar system, Boss predicts that any of them that have liquid water could also have life.

“Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs,” he said in the article. “But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence.”

Soon, NASA will launch the Kepler Mission, which contains a telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years, the report said, in an aim to detect small dips in a star’s brightness that could indicate the presence of orbiting planets. The mission is scheduled for launch March 5.

Scientists may have discovered the first proof that Mars currently hosts liquid water, according to National Geographic.

In a series of photos taken of the Phoenix Mars robotic craft’s landing strut, liquid droplets appear to be growing, dripping, and merging over the course of the past month, the report said. Scientists working on the mission said that the globs are probably saline mud that splashed onto the strut when the craft landed; salt in the mud could have absorbed water vapor in the atmosphere and formed the drops.

Phoenix co-investigator Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan said in the article that the water can stay liquid even in the frigid Martian arctic because it contains a high amount of perchlorates. “[That’s] a salt with properties like the antifreeze used to melt snow here in Michigan,” Renno said. While the evidence points to the presence of liquid water, it’s probably not the kind that could harbor life—it’s too cold and salty, according to the report.

Diesel enthusiasts can rejoice: after a year of significantly higher prices, the average cost of a gallon of diesel fuel has fallen back below the price of premium gasoline, according to Autoblog.

Diesel now averages $2.18 per gallon, compared with $2.19 for premium gas and $1.96 for regular. Now that we’re finally beginning to see some clean diesel vehicles that match gasoline cars for clean emissions and beat them on EPA fuel economy estimates, the falling cost of diesel fuel could help spur sales of cars like the 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI, the BMW 335d, and the various Mercedes BlueTEC models.

I’ve driven both the 335d and the Jetta TDI recently. Both cars are solid options for environmentally-minded enthusiasts, and have a much greater cruising range than their gasoline-powered counterparts. The 335d is also ridiculously quick; Car and Driver clocked its 0-60 time at 5.7 seconds, and the 425 lb-ft of torque makes it feel even faster from behind the wheel.

As convergence becomes a desirable route to take in gadgetry, easier access to its various features has become an aim for MIT’s Brandon Taylor and Michael Bove. These two decided it would be useful to expand device’s capability to sense what it’s going to be used for and change interfaces like how a phone’s screen dims during a phone call. What they came up was a “bar of soap” device – a basic gadget with an LCD screen on the front and rear, a three-axis accelerometer and 72 sensors to keep track of where the users’ fingers are positioned.

Like what it was designed to do, the gadget can change its interface based on how the user holds it – PDA, cell phone, remote control, game controller and camera are some of its possible modes. By testing the prototype of the device on 13 users, it was determined that it would work better if it’s optimized for each user rather than as a generalized gadget. This means that if ever the technology becomes widespread, we could see devices that could be customized and hence be more personalized than the gadgets we commonly see today.