In September 2006, Ehab Youssef, an intellectual property lawyer in San Jose, California, was shopping for a new car. With gas prices surging above $3 a gallon and headlines warning of a disappearing ice cap, Youssef and his wife were looking to offset their Toyota Land Cruiser with something more fuel-efficient. One day, while researching vehicles on the Web, he came across ZAP Corporation. A small California company, ZAP seemed to be doing what Detroit couldn’t: bringing environmentally friendly cars to the masses. Read more…

Apple Reinvents Film Biz With iTunes Movie Rentals
Apple is about to turn the movie rentals business on its ear.
The new iTunes movie rentals service, announced Tuesday by Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his Macworld Expo keynote, is powered by deals with all the major film studios and stands to reinvent the way people rent and watch movies, analysts say. Read more…

CES: FyreTV Brings the Porn for Ten Bucks a Mont

In the old days, pornography was delivered as printed matter wrapped up in plain brown paper. Now it can come to you over the internet, via a set-top box with an innocuous-looking generic black chassis. Read more…

David X. Cohen is watching a short animation clip on a computer monitor. It’s a tight shot of two robots’ pelvises. They thrust their cube-shaped midsections together and swap a DVD from one of their disc drives to the other. This, Cohen explains, is footage of a sci-fi stage show, a suggestive all-robot version of Cirque du Soleil. “Nothing makes me happier than a scene with no living being in it,” he says. Read more…

In an unprecedented feat of biological alchemy, researchers have turned human skin cells into stem cells that hold the same medical promise as controversial embryonic stem cells. Read more…

Kung-fu’s influence on hip hop has been around since the ’70s, when B-boys busted Bruce Lee moves while break-dancing. But in 1993, gritty rap supergroup the Wu-Tang Clan released Enter the Wu-Tang (36-Chambers), the first chart-topping album to kick up raw rhymes with dialog sampled from underground Hong Kong flicks. Read more…