Li-Fi — that just-over-the-horizon wireless technology which could transform your everyday LED lighting fixtures into 10 Gbps wireless modems — has a lot of people talking these days. With a commercial product promised later this year and the tech already in beta, we might all be trippin' the lamplight fantastic real soon. But other than really, really awesome movie streaming speeds, what do we care? According to its inventor Harald Haas, Li-Fi offers a bundle of niche applications that regular Wi-Fi just doesn't measure up to. Here are a few of those unique benefits.

Finding great science fiction reads, especially in a sea of millions of available books, can be a daunting task. And if you want to support independent self-published authors, it can be next to impossible finding that perfect book to read. Fortunately, StoryBundle has decided to make this process much easier. The concept behind StoryBundle is a simple one: select a group of quality self-published books and offer them to the public for whatever price people are willing to pay. Similar in concept to many indie video game bundles (think HumbleBundle), StoryBundle is the brainchild of Jason Chen. Chen and his team read all of the titles themselves and then decide which ones to offer in the bundle. And the reader decides what price to pay. It's basically a win-win for everyone involved. In an interview with Chen, we discussed the benefits of StoryBundle to science fiction authors and readers.

Today, February 20th, is the 50th anniversary of John Glenn's orbital spaceflight. In 1961, Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth (three times!), which as far as I can tell, is why we're all taking the day off today. Such an achievement was one of the primary objectives of the Mercury Program, which preceded Gemini and Apollo. While Glenn was most definitely the first American to orbit, his mission (Mercury-Atlas 6) was the twenty-first Mercury mission. Before NASA was ready to launch a human into space, they had to make sure that the rockets were safe, the space capsules were safe, and that space itself was safe (since we had no idea). And NASA had to be absolutely, positively sure, because if they got it wrong, it would have disastrous implications for the future of space exploration. So. NASA tested everything out. Thoroughly. Before they ever sent a human to space, they had to get as close as they could get while not sending a human, and this means that the first American residents into space included two monkeys, two chimpanzees, and a robotic "crewman simulator." This is their story.

On every mission of NASA's Gemini program in the mid 1960s, the astronauts took Hasselblad 500c cameras with 70mm film and Zeiss 60mm lenses along with them. You've almost certainly seen a few of the more famous pictures that were taken on Gemini, but Arizona State has recently scanned in all of the original negatives (nearly 3,000 of them) and put them online in a high-resolution archive for the first time. We've looked through every single one and picked out the very best from each mission to tell you their stories.