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So how do you think your favorite baseball team will fare in 2008? New Jersey Institute of Technology's Bruce Bukiet has some fodder for the baseball buffs among us.

For the past seven seasons, Bukiet has been using a mathematical model to predict how many games each Major League Baseball team is likely to win. The Mets fan sees his team edging the Braves in the NL East divisional race, with 92 wins. In the AL East, Bukiet's formula has the Yankees and Red Sox both finishing up with 98 victories.

Of course, like any of the countless baseball predictions made each year, Bukiet's should probably be take with a grain of salt. Bukiet had an off year in 2007, correctly picking only two clear Division winners. That's something to give, say a Giants fan like yours truly, some hope. My beloved San Francisco team is pegged as the NL West cellar dweller with just 75 wins.

Check out Bruce Bukiet's predictions in LiveScience: "Study Predicts Baseball's Top Teams in 2008"

Shanghai developers plan to begin construction next year on what they say will be the world's first sustainable "eco-city" on a plot almost the size of Manhattan. The Dongtan, or East Beach, project is to be built on Chongming Island and is slated to eventually support half a million residents.

Among other things, the city is envisioned to recycle almost all of its waste, produce its electricity, and ferry people around in hydrogen fuel-cell buses and solar-powered water taxis, according to The Seattle Times

But amid high hopes, there is fear that the environmental project will end up as "another grand idea that failed in practice."

Read the story at The Seattle Times: "Can a bold new "eco-city" clear the air in China?"

Scientists in Germany believe they have discovered how humans are able to filter out unimportant noise in order to zoom in on that single voice they want to hear.

Neuroscientist Holger Schulze and his colleagues think the brain's auditory system probably sorts different sources of sound based on their unique pitch and suppresses less important ones.

The scientists conducted experiments on gerbils, which have a similar hearing mechanism to humans, reports Live Science.

Read the story at Live Science: "Party trick: How we hear one voice amid many"

In the wake of science fiction great Arthur C. Clarke's passing last week at the age of 90, Popular Mechanics' Erik Sofge examines 10 futuristic movies that "got the science right, or will sometime soon."

Read more at Popular Mechanics: "The 10 most prophetic sci-fi movies ever"

What do Princess Leia headphones, a Darth Vader gumball machine, and a Jabba the Hutt beanbag chair have in common? They're all Star Wars promotional merchandise rejects you won't be finding on eBay anytime soon.

NPR's The Bryant Park Project caught up with Jason Geyer and Steve Ross, two product designers tapped to create merchandise for the Star Wars "prequels" back in the late 1990s.

Some of their products worked, and some, like the Han Solo refrigerator, bombed. Read the story and check out the audio slideshow at NPR: "Rejected: 'Star Wars' merchandise you'll never own"

Bar owner Rufus Terrill has enlisted a rather odd-looking security guard to chase away prostitutes and drug dealers milling about his Atlanta tavern: an R2-D2-like robot called "Bum Bot 2000."

The patchwork device is controlled via remote control and targets law-breakers, reports The Los Angeles Times. But homeless advocates aren't too fond of Terrill's water-squirting Bum Bot.

Read the full Los Angeles Times story: "Robot reports for security duty in Atlanta"

Wii aficionados are having a smashing good time these days--at their TVs' expense.

Gamers need to get a grip, literally. It seems quite a few virtual golfers are turning their Wiimotes into Wii projectiles, damaging their beloved plasma and LCD TV screens in the process. Now, Panasonic engineers are coming to the rescue.

The company is working on reinforcing the screens by applying old-style TV tube-making technology, says New Scientist.

In a demonstration, Panasonic hung a steel ball on the end of a cord and let it swing against a screen to simulate an impact equivalent to the Wii remote being hurled at the screen from across a room.

Read the story at New Scientist: "TVs reinforced for those smashing Wii games"

Is a Toshiba Blu-ray player in the works? Can Sony and Blu-ray be bested by cheaper "upconverting" players?

Read David Carnoy's post on Crave: "When will Toshiba put out a Blu-ray player?"

Jumping on the HD DVD bandwagon was fun for many early adopters--until Blu-ray knocked the format off the road, causing Toshiba's tech to spin out, crash, and burn. Those dazed folks still left clutching their brand-new HD DVD high-definition disc players are now scratching their heads saying, "What was I thinking?"

Slate's Josh Levin is one of those format "losers" pondering his HD DVD "D'oh" moment.

Read the story at Slate: "I'm the idiot who bought an HD DVD player"

Astronomers are using the world's largest supercomputers to transform theories and formulas into animated 3D simulations of black holes colliding, stars being born, and gamma-ray bursts blowing everything else away.

Check out the story and image gallery at Popsci.com: "Cutting edge visions of cosmic extremes"