Nextgov

Tesla Is First Green Tech Firm to Pay Back Its Energy Dept. Loan

9:26 AM ET Tesla no longer owes the federal government a dime. On Wednesday the company announced it had repaid the outsanding balance of $451.8 million, with interest, on its 2009 Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing loan from the Department of Energy. That means taxpayers earned a very, very small $12 million profit on ...

Student Spies Trade NIH Research to China in Exchange for Tuition

May 22, 2013 Three scientists working at New York University's Langone Medical Center are accused of passing research funded by the National Institutes of Health to a rival research institute funded by the Chinese government. For one scientist, his compensation was pre-paid grad school tuition. NYU hired Yudong Zhu, a 44-year-old "accomplished researcher ...

Syria's Internet Is Offline Again

May 15, 2013 For the second time in as many weeks, the Internet usage in Syria disappeared mysteriously around 10 a.m. local time Wednesday with little to no warning. So, is it another case of the Assad regime trying to disrupt rebel communications or are they really having technical difficulties? There were some ...

Freedom: BlackBerry's BBM Is Coming to the iPhone

May 14, 2013 Considering there's a large swath of people who hate iMessage for its frequent downtime and unreliability, you would think BlackBerry would be smart enough to launch its long-popular BlackBerry Messenger app for the iPhone. Oh, they're doing that now? And for Android, too? Good. Finally. Now here's how they're going ...

Astronauts at the International Space Station Successfully Fixed Leaky Pump

May 13, 2013 Astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn completed the most impromptu spacewalk in NASA history ahead of schedule. The two men spent roughly five hours outside of the International Space Station repairing an ammonia pump used to cool the laboratory's engine system. The ammonia pump was the chief suspect when little ...

from govexec

Feds Refuse to Satisfy Beyoncé Lip-Sync Truthers

May 2, 2013 Beyoncé truthers have been working hard to discover what really happened on that fateful Inauguration Day: The Marine Corps said she was lip syncing, only to backtrack about the national anthem backing track, before Beyoncé admitted her transgression in fabulous fashion, but apparently that still wasn't enough. So far, the ...

Boston Bombers Didn't Use Cellphones Detonators -- but Could Have

April 25, 2013 The Associated Press reported Wednesday afternoon that bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhr Tsarnaev used a remote control of some sort to detonate their two homemade pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon last Monday. The type of detonator the two men used remains unclear, but the Justice Department complaint outlining ...

The Bird Flu Has Spread Beyond China, and It's 'One of the Most Lethal' Ever

April 24, 2013 The new strain of bird flu infecting and killing people in China is on the move. All of the reported cases had been contained to a relative few hotspots, but the first reported case of a human infection outside mainland China arrived Wednesday, and that's got the world's top scientists ...

Google Fiber Is Coming to Provo, Utah — Because It Already Had Fancy Internet

April 18, 2013 Last Tuesday, Google announced another reason to be jealous of Austin, Texas — the city became the second place in the U.S. where Google would offer its super fast, affordable fiber Internet service. Well, this week you can be jealous of Provo, Utah. Yes, a little place called Provo (population: ...

from govexec

Botched Attack Kills State Department Employee in Afghanistan

April 8, 2013 An assassination attempt in Afghanistan on Sunday resulted in the first death of a State Department employee since the war there began. Anne Smedinghoff, a 25-year-old State Department official, was killed when a Taliban bomb targeting Zabul province Governor Ashraf Nasari went off as the State Department's transportation convoy intersected ...