Wired News polls the experts to find out how to build a better voting machine. One that’s stable, hard to hack, and combines the best of digital and analog voting. Conceived as an engineering problem, our current problems make you wonder what’s taking so long.

New Scientist writes of an interesting variant on the man-machine partnership. A new software application watches human cartographers turn satellite images into maps and then learns enough to take the task over.

All the environmental blogs are talking about economist Sir Nicholas Stern’s report on climate change, but Slashdot nails what’s likely to be the most influential conclusion, that dealing with climate change now will cost a lot less than dealing with it later.

T-post has got to be one of the most original ideas in publishing (and a sign of how inexpensive production has become). Subscribers get T-shirts printed with a topical illustration on the outside, a summary of a news story on the inside. [coolhunting]

Using the ocean to generate power is an old idea, but one that so far hasn’t spat out its ‘killer app’. Until now, perhaps – enter biomimetic ocean power. These are devices designed to react to ocean waves in the most effective and efficient way possible, by mimicking the form and motion of things that belong in that environment, like kelp and fish tails. Seriously – it sounds a little leftfield at first, but it looks like they’ve really thought this through.