From bad girls and zombies to circus freaks and killer cars, the shock-and-awful recipe for grindhouse movies' tasty cinematic sausage never fails to satisfy. As Robert Rodriguez's timely homage hits screens, we look back at several decades of surprisingly influential B movies.

Viking 2, the second mission to Mars, lands on the planet and begins transmitting pictures and soil analyses.

Learn the nickname for the first synthetic organism and a derisive term for ungrammatical Tea Party signs.

Using Foursquare to stamp out sexually transmitted diseases is just the beginning of a brave new war on bothersome reality. Just think of all the amazing problems we can solve with the proper mix of badges, exclusive offers and unbridled optimism.

A phone-hacking scheme involving British royals and reporters working for one of Rupert Murdoch's tabloid newspapers went far beyond what was previously disclosed and prosecuted. The British Prime Minister's current media adviser is accused of having encouraged the hacking.

If it's September, it's football season — which also means it's time for millions of fantasy football drafts around the world to commence. Maximize your in-season points while dealing with the setbacks that are bound to occur by following our guide.

The video site's ever-evolving terms of service drive an observer mad in this arty clip by Carlo Zanni. No charge for the 1984 references.

This week’s big Apple announcement featured one big disappointment: Apple TV’s relative lack of, well, TV. Out of all of the hundreds of channels available on cable and satellite, only ABC and Fox agreed to offer their programs for rent on Apple TV. The fact that Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder in, and on the board of, Disney — owner of ABC — perfectly illustrates this digital divide.

Unlike infectious disease and information, behavior change spreads faster through online networks that have many close connections instead of many distant ties. Redundancy is key, as people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see many others doing it. "There has been a lot of theory about the difference between information and behavior spreading," said economic sociologist Damon Centola of MIT and author of the study published Sept. 3 in Science. "We've assumed that they are the same, but you can imagine that behavior is not really like that, that you need to be convinced."

A new batch of sharp Martian close-ups from NASA's HiRISE camera were released, and we've gathered some of the best in the gallery.

The atmosphere of a young exoplanet didn't fit any of our existing models for what gas giants should look like. But when astronomers added huge dust clouds, it was a perfect fit, perhaps revealing a larger truth about gas giants.

Magnetic minerals in 15-million-year-old rocks appear to preserve a moment when the magnetic north pole was rapidly on its way to becoming the south pole, and vice versa.

Development Seed is engineering tools to create custom maps that work in a wider variety of situations such as natural disasters and in the developing world.

A reinterpretation of the fossil record suggests a new answer to one of evolution's existential questions: whether global mass extinctions are just short-term diversions in life's preordained course, or send life careening down wholly new paths.

The official Twitter app for iPad is finally here, and star developer Loren Brichter has polished yet another gem. Twitter for iPad sports a really elegant interface that's significantly faster and more intuitive than competing Twitter clients we've tested (such as Twitterific and Tweetdeck).

Fujitsu's scanner is your new (albeit bulky) buddy if you want high-quality images. The sturdy document feeder gets pages in straight, so you get them out right.

Google is celebrating the second birthday of its Chrome web browser with the release of Chrome 6. Among the new features are an updated user interface, auto-fill for web forms, extension syncing, increased speed and numerous bug fixes.

People in Silicon Valley have focused on the set-top box as the lever to attack the cable industry. Cable boxes blow, but that's a losing battle. So why is Apple TV different? Because Steve Jobs has not just created a new set top box. He's actually created a whole new media ecosystem built around the mobile phone.

It looks like a motorcycle, it performs like a Lotus and it's racing around the world.

String theory has finally made a prediction that can be tested with experiments — but in a completely unexpected realm of physics: quantum entanglement.

Chemical analysis of the bones of an ancient Sudanese Nubians who lived nearly 2,000 years ago shows they were ingesting the antibiotic tetracycline on a regular basis — likely from a special brew of beer. The find is the strongest yet to support that antibiotics were previously discovered by humans before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928.

Samsung has announced the launch of a tablet that could become the first major Android-powered challenger to the Apple iPad.

The uncharacteristically snowy weather that hit Northern Europe and North America in the winter of 2009 to 2010 was caused by a rare combination of two separate weather oscillations in the Atlantic and Pacific, claim meteorologists.

Superman is a surly noob searching for reality in the digital age in J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis' update of the superhero's origin story. Who knew the Man of Steel would miss the musty Daily Planet more than the rest of us?

Six weeks after landing men on the moon, Americans take another giant leap for mankind with the nation’s first cash-spewing, automated teller machine.

Video calls aren't for people to see you — they're for people to see what you see.

Blazing fast (four minutes and nine seconds!), streamlined and full of highlights, Cuisinart's PerfecTemp puts its kettle competition to shame.

A Q&A with Jeff Ma, the former leader of the infamous MIT Blackjack Team that took Vegas for millions in the mid-'90s. Now a successful entrepreneur and author, Ma talks about his love of fantasy sports, selling his company Citizen Sports to Yahoo (and why he didn't join them), and how young statgeeks can make their way in a sports industry dominated by traditionalists.

Two psychiatric experts think the way to treat troops returning home with PTSD: Have them undergo intensive psychotherapy while they're rolling on ecstasy.

In 1983 Nintendo released the Famicon console. Now 26 years later we tear it apart to see what makes it tick.

There's a sign of hope for frustrated Google Apps users who feel left out of getting all the cool toys regular Google users get: Google is inviting select users this week to test out Apps with all the bells and whistles.

Want to start reading some science fiction, but aren't sure where to begin? This introductory sci-fi literature syllabus is just for you.

A furor has broken out among biologists over ant specialist E.O. Wilson's latest attack on a concept used to explain the origins of self-sacrifice in the dog-eat-dog world of evolution.

We know — the new Apple TV is really small, and cheap and easy-to-use. That's all good, but still not knocking our socks off despite being the ripest area for expansion by a company that has already firmly established itself on the computer, phone, portable media player and tablet. Here are five reasons Apple TV is still boring.

While it can take a mere one or two strokes to hit the green, every golfer knows the torture of a four or five-putt adventure once they get there. So whether you're trying to get your golf game back on track or trying to become a Putt-putt superstar, head for the practice green.

There's a lot to say about the new Apple TV that Steve Jobs presented today. But I'm not going to talk about the tiny little box. I'm not going to talk about your TV, either ... much. Instead, I’m going to talk about that remote.

Apple audaciously seems to think the world actually needs another social network — one that you even need special software to be part of, to boot. With the introduction Wednesday of Ping, a music-centered community that exists only within iTunes, they are probably right — and then some.

EpicMix, a new RFID-based app for skiers, combines performance tracking with real-time, location-based social networking functionality. (Think Nike+ meets Foursquare.) It'll go live at several Colorado ski resorts in November, and we've got an early look.

Federal regulators are putting off efforts to regain authority over the nation’s internet providers while they seek renewed public input on net neutrality.

Apple has refreshed its family of iPod products. The iPod Nano, iPod Touch and iPod Shuffle all received some compelling makeovers that should help Apple stay in the lead in the portable media-player market.

As the recently resurrected sci-fi cartoon hits the century mark, executive producer David X. Cohen and voice actors Billy West, Lauren Tom and David Herman look back on their favorite moments.

When Steve Jobs was preparing to introduce the Apple TV, he called it "one more hobby," and based on our first impressions, that's a safe choice of words. The new Apple TV is a major hardware revamp — one quarter the size of its predecessor.

On this leg of his around-the-world drive, our man at the wheel discovers the Wild West is still wild.

The new Apple TV, which will go on sale at the end of September for $100, is a puny box just one-quarter the size of the previous model. It has an HDMI port, a built-in power supply, an optical audio port, an ethernet jack, and built-in Wi-Fi.

Hot water discovered around a giant carbon star requires a new theory for the chemistry around stars to be explained. The new theory could significantly alter our understanding of what materials exist in interstellar space, and where water and life could exist in the universe.

Aston reportedly will offer the gussied-up Toyota iQ in the United States, presumably to help it meet tightening CAFE regs.

The unexpected emergence of complex patterns in an apparently unremarkable dish of muscle cells may give researchers a valuable tool for studying self-organizing systems.

A photo series on Las Vegas casino carpets shows how eye-rending the environments there really are.

The Army was so concerned about the mental health of alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning that, prior to the alleged leaks, supervisors removed the bolt from his military weapon, thereby disabling it.

The U.S. response to the disaster pales in comparison to Haiti, and that could be a huge problem given Pakistan's strategic importance.