The new Motorola Atrix is a smartphone that aspires to be much more than that.

The
Atrix can be thought of as one of the first examples of a post-PC
computer, offering many of the same advantages of a PC in a much
smaller, more portable and more adaptable form.

Tesla Roadsters, Nissan Leafs
and Chevy Volts are already on the market, and every major automaker
has at least one electric model in the pipeline, giving consumers an
array of choices in the coming years. The new wave of EVs just beginning
to hit American highways is not the first -- they were popular a
century ago until cheaper, gasoline-powered cars gained dominance after
World War I. But experts say the stars now appear to be aligned for an
alternative to the internal combustion engine.

A new
university study shows that as we age, it gets tougher to successfully
"multitask," or remembering to complete one task while distracted by
another.

Using brain scans, a team of UC San Francisco researchers
have discovered that people over age 60 are less agile in switching
from one neural network to another -- which means that brief
attention-grabbing interruptions can undermine their ability to recall
the original task.

"A lot of us feel the need to respond really
rapidly to an email or text message," said Dr. Adam Gazzaley, director
of the UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center and senior author of the study,
which was published in Monday's issue of the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.