Sommaire pour May 2013 de Popular Science

IN 2007, my first year of working at Popular Science, we launched the Invention Awards, a celebration of dogged innovators everywhere, and gave one of the first to Leonard Duffy. His success until then had been limited to a cookbook stand, which sold for a time on QVC. Then, from his workshop in Vermont, he took a stab at updating the product that everyone wishes he or she had thought up: Velcro. His version, unflatteringly named the slidingly engaging fastener, was an interlocking patterned material that he used to make a breathable, waterproof replacement for a Velcro cast. We found him just as his material had won a NASA contest; today, it has evolved into 10 U.S. patents. I've always thought of him as the very model of what these…

No matter how frequently mediums borrow from one another—a game based on a movie, a movie on a book—the distinction between them has always remained clear. But those boundaries are starting to break down. This spring, the Syfy network, in tandem with game developer Trion Worlds, debuted Defiance, a story that unfolds simultaneously in a TV show and in an online gaming world. For the first time, gamers will have a chance to impact a show by playing an MMORPG. Defiance takes place on Earth 33 years in the future, after an alien war. The characters on the show—a mix of human and alien races—live in what remains of St. Louis, while the in-game characters live in San Francisco. For the first season, the developers and producers choreographed a series…

Palmer Luckey built his first virtual-reality (VR) headset for a simple reason: Every attempt he'd seen, including his own collection of 46 pairs of goggles, failed in one way or another—too heavy, too slow, too limited a field of view. So he set out to invent the perfect pair himself. Three years after the first mockup, the company Luckey founded, Oculus, is launching a developer version of the Rift, the first consumer VR system to create a truly immersive experience. A player connects the Rift to a PC via USB and HDMI, and the PC's graphics processor renders side-by-side 3-D images. The 11-ounce goggles contain a seven-inch LCD that displays both images. A pair of aspherical lenses separate them to create a 3-D effect with a field of view that's…

In the 1970s, fish farmers in the southern U.S. imported Asian carp to clean up scum in their catfish ponds. But in the years that followed, the fish escaped into the Mississippi River and quickly spread. Since then, they've moved into 23 states, outeating and outpopulating native species. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is developing poisonous microparticles designed to kill Asian carp exclusively. The idea is to put the poison in a package that only these carp can digest thoroughly enough to absorb a lethal dose. Researchers examined Mississippi River basin fish and found that Asian carp have more of the digestive enzyme trypsin. So they mixed a poison with compounds that only trypsin can break down. This spring, they plan to test the particles on Asian carp in…

Business is booming at Europe's largest port, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, which sees the lion's share of the continent's imports and exports. About 34,000 ships and 12 million shipping containers—each large enough to hold 27 refrigerators, 175 bicycles, or 2,500 pairs of jeans—already pass through it each year. But that's nothing compared with the 32 million containers it will handle by 2035. With no land for expansion, the Port of Rotterdam Authority has approved a $4-billion project to turn four square miles of 66-foot-deep ocean into dry ground for what will likely become the most advanced port in the world, Maasvlakte 2. The new facility will include automated container-moving vehicles powered by 13-ton batteries in place of diesel and a harbor so deep it will accommodate superships that haven't even…

ONE DAY IN 2009, Israeli engineer Izhar Gafni sat in a quiet library designing a machine to extract seeds from pomegranates when his mind drifted to cycling, his favorite pastime. Gafni admired bikes made from sustainable bamboo, but their high cost seemed prohibitive. He wondered, Why not make them from cardboard, instead? Over the next two years, Gafni learned to fold cardboard sheets into the strongest possible shapes; his experimentation led to robust structures resembling honeycombs and bird nests. He then spent another year crafting the material into bicycle components. “I almost felt like the Wright Brothers going into unknown territory,” he says. The product of his labor is a single-speed bicycle with spokes, rims, and a frame made from cardboard. Varnish protects the glued paper core from moisture, while…

SEMITRUCK DRIVERS idle their engines to heat or cool their vehicles' cabs—a practice that burns a billion gallons of fuel each year. Small engines on the back of a cab, called auxiliary power units (APUs), get the job done with less fuel, but they're loud and smelly. A team of five Ontario-based engineers and mechanics has devised what may be a better solution: an APU called HYPER that runs on waste heat. The group originally formed to build a 100mpg car for the 2008 X Prize competition. During one brainstorming session, someone wondered aloud: Why not use energy from a vehicle's exhaust to run an HVAC system? “We did a lot of modeling and realized that the energy numbers made sense,” says team member Jack MacDonnell. He and two others…

DURING NASA'S 2007 Astronaut Glove Challenge, costume fabricator Ted Southern met fellow competitor Nikolay Moiseev, a Russian space-suit builder. Although each walked away from the competition empty-handed, they formed a productive friendship. Two years later, they entered a glove they built together and won $100,000. Southern and Moiseev are now building the third generation of a complete space suit, called 3G, in hopes of capturing a piece of the suborbital spaceflight industry—valued at $1.6 billion over the next decade. As companies such as Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, XCOR, and Blue Origin prepare to launch tourists toward the edge of space, Southern says the dangers of the environment have opened up a new market. “It's almost a full vacuum up there,” he says. At about $200,000 each, modern space suits can cost…

MORE THAN 780 million people rely on kerosene to light their homes. But the fuel is pricey and is toxic when burned—not to mention a fire hazard. In 2008, London-based product designer Martin Riddiford and his colleague Jim Reeves decided to create a cheap, safe alternative. Riddiford knew a falling weight could produce enough energy to run a grandfather clock, so why not a light? To find out, he attached the crank of a wind-up flashlight to a bicycle wheel. He hung a weight from the wheel to cause it to spin; the wheel cranked the flashlight, and the device lit up. Over the next four years, Riddiford, Reeves, and a small team spent their downtime between projects in a basement, refining the GravityLight. To use it, a person hangs…

AS A KID, electrical engineer Dan Sullivan mastered the guitar. His teenage sons, however, prefer mastering videogames. With a realistic instrument, Sullivan thought, all the time devoted to games like Rock Band could produce impressive musical proficiency. “You can show off playing guitar when you're my age,” says Sullivan, now 58. “Being able to beat level 17 isn't going to stay with you.” Seven years ago, Sullivan left his cushy CTO job at a video-advertising company to develop JamStik, a digital six-string guitar. The compact neck has frets and strings like a real guitar but requires no tuning and doesn't rely on push buttons like many digital models. Instead, small sensors embedded in the fret board track fingers illuminated by 52 infrared LEDs. Because the sensors are spaced just a…

After tagging more than 75 sharks, researchers at the University of Miami have built a database that tracks the movements of several species. The nine individuals here have vastly different migration patterns. The bull shark Lia covered only 20 miles over 74 days, while Linda, a tiger shark, traveled more than 2,000 miles up the Eastern seaboard. “She encircles an area the size of a billion football fields,” says Hammerschlag. “I had no idea we would see that scale.”…

In the competitive world of roller-coaster design, engineers often obsess about smashing records and pushing the limits of human endurance. But records mean little if the ride leaves thrill seekers feeling beat-up. For the engineers at the coaster-design firm Bolliger and Mabillard (B&M), it's not enough to simply go faster, taller, or twistier. “A good coaster should be smooth and comfortable,” says B&M founder Walter Bolliger. When the firm's newest coaster, the Gatekeeper, opens this month at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, it will claim plenty of records, including one for world's tallest upside-down drop—165 feet. It's also the longest and loopiest of the world's five “wing coasters.” A B&M signature, wing coasters seat passengers on each side of the track in order to mimic the sensation of riding on…

I'm a mechanical engineer who loves bicycling. When gas prices soared through the roof in 2009, I rode my bike to save money. I wanted to charge USB devices, such as my phone, during commutes but didn't want to spend $150 (or more) on a commercial wheel-hub generator. In the end, I was able to build a cheaper system. Electrical work wasn't my expertise, so I had to teach myself how to build circuits from the ground up. I'm now on version three of my two-port USB generator, which is about 70 percent efficient above 12 mph and creates less drag on bike wheels than other designs. With the right equipment, you can build one yourself. A stepper motor converts the rear wheel's spinning motion into electricity. To keep the…

Music fan Andrew Wayne loved the funky 1970s headphones he purchased from a flea market. But he didn't like switching between the vintage pair and modern, wireless headphones compatible with his smartphone. So Wayne simplified his life using an inexpensive Bluetooth adapter. Give your own wired cans some brand-new abilities by following these steps. INSTRUCTIONS: Buy a Bluetooth adapter (about $15), pry open the case, and set aside its electronic innards. Open your vintage headphones—the larger the cans, the better—and remove the speakers and wiring. Grab one male and one female 1/8-inch stereo jack, plus three short lengths of speaker wire: two split into a Y shape and a third split into an X. Solder one end of a Y-shaped wire to the right speaker's positive lead and the other…

The first manned solar-powered airplane flight was more of a hop. Solar One, created by British entrepreneur Fred To, sailed 59 feet over Lasham Airfield outside London on December 19, 1978. Four months later, a photon-fueled hang glider called Solar Riser traveled half a mile over Riverside, California. “Hardly impressive stats,” Popular Science editor Ben Kocivar wrote in July 1980, “yet these faltering flights…may be as significant as the Wright brothers' first trials.” To achieve truly sustained solar-powered flight, the inventors of Solar One and Solar Riser needed lighter, cheaper, and more efficient components. Today, technology has caught up with the dream: Engineers in Switzerland are on track to send a pilot around the world in a solar aircraft for the first time. Turn to page 62 to learn more…

How do we incentivize the private sector to make brain research as ego-stroking an endeavor as supertall buildings? (One could apply the same question to carbon-capture and storage technologies that are our only hope to slow global warming.) We need to find a way to make funding research as glamorous as constructing taller buildings. Irfan AliHerndon, Va. FROM THE EDITORS After the March issue went to press, President Obama announced plans for a 10-year scientific effort to build a comprehensive map of human brain activity—just the kind of “supertall spirit” that Ward mentioned in his letter. The initiative, essentially a Human Genome Project for the brain, could spark major advances in mental-illness treatment, artificial intelligence, and, ultimately, our understanding of consciousness.…

Personal amphibious vehicles have always felt like half-baked mashups—boats with wheels or cars with fins. But a craft can eclipse those attempts if it does two things: move as fast over water as it does on land and transition quickly from land to sea. Last year, Gibbs Sports Amphibians, a private Michigan company, announced that it had built a suspension that retracts in just five seconds and a transmission that consistently propels a craft to 45 mph. Gibbs delivered its first vehicles, large “amphitrucks” for tasks such as water rescue, last year. A smaller recreational version called the Quadski is on sale now. Gibbs engineers outfitted the Quadski with a modified automotive dual-wishbone suspension. To ensure that the fiberglass V-shaped hull has enough ground clearance, they repositioned the upright shaft,…

ELECTRONICS manufacturers have a terrible, misleading habit. They slap a touchscreen and Wi-Fi radio on an appliance and call it “smart.” But in reality, access to Epicurious recipes and Facebook feeds doesn't impart a refrigerator, or any other appliance, with real intelligence. They can't think on their own; they just have a flashy new interface. To be smart, appliances need to be aware of their surroundings and adapt to them, a reality that's only a few years off. Manufacturers have spent the greatest amount of time fiddling with the most commonly used household appliance: the refrigerator. In the early 2000s, GE set the benchmark, demoing a prototype refrigerator that kept track of groceries and compiled shopping lists based on what was—or wasn't—inside. Trouble was, for the system to work, users…

Last year, a 54-year-old Canadian woman had a malignant brain tumor that was blurring her left field of vision and causing severe headaches. It needed to be removed. So David Fortin, a neurosurgeon at the Sherbrooke University Hospital Centre in Quebec, ordered a tractography map from Maxime Chamberland. A computer scientist at the hospital's imaging center, Chamberland is one of an increasing number of researchers using tractography, a technique that follows water's movement in the brain to map neuronal connections. Before surgery, he runs 64 3-D MRI scans through a computer program that calculates the direction of water diffusion. (In the map above, neural fibers near the tumor are red and the ones farther away, blue. The tumor itself is solid red.) Knowing how the tumor is interfering with the…

IN JANUARY, scientists scared the world by using public information to find the names behind five people's anonymous, public DNA samples collected for research. The scientists then determined the identity of some 45 family members who had also donated DNA. How? By linking ages and locations associated with the five individuals to family trees associated with DNA on genealogy websites. (The subjects' ages were then removed from public view.) The stunt, intended to raise awareness, also raised new fears—insurance companies denying coverage, discriminatory hiring practices, and the end of dating as we know it. But these 50 people aren't any less safe than the rest of us. No one's DNA is—or has ever been—private. We spray our genetic material everywhere. We slough off a million skin cells a day. And…

Most independent inventors don't have bottomless bank accounts. To fund their dreams, many innovators are appealing to strangers on the Web for help. Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler weighs in on this growing source of grassroots venture capital. How does crowdfunding work? Traditional funding channels support things with the potential to create revenue—you're looking for hits. On Kickstarter, people fund the ideas that they think should exist. People have always had great ideas, and others have always wanted to be a part of them. We've made a space where that can happen on a massive scale. The JOBS Act now allows people to buy equity in projects. Will that benefit both inventors and crowdfunders? Kickstarter won't switch to an equity-based model. We believe the real disruption comes from people supporting things…

James Dyson, industrial designer, bagless vacuum pioneer “You can produce something quickly and accurately and then test it to see if it works.” Saul Griffith, engineer and founder of Otherlab “Mills can make real things in real materials. I'm still loving subtractive manufacturing despite the additive hype.” Roger Brown, inventor of toys, tools, and kitchenware “It's 10 tools in one—and great for taking things apart to see how they work.” Nikolai Begg, MIT engineer, inventor of medical devices “You're able to snap a photo and have it in a collection you can quickly reference.” Lonnie Johnson, Super Soaker creator, battery and energy technology inventor “Mechanical devices glue together quite nicely for diving right into prototyping.”…

AFTER AN EARTHQUAKE devastated Haiti in 2010, search-and-rescue teams descended upon Port-au-Prince to look for survivors. Francisco Aguilar, a graduate student in public policy at the time, was shocked to read stories about crews relying on complex, expensive imaging systems. “Only a few teams had them, and you had to be really well trained to use them,” Aguilar says. He soon launched a start-up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop a simple way to explore hard-to-reach places: a throwable, expendable, baseball-size probe. The Bounce Imaging Explorer has a shock-absorbing shell embedded with six cameras, plus clusters of near-infrared LEDs to light up dark rooms (for the cameras). To deploy the Explorer, an emergency worker links it to a smartphone or tablet and chucks the ball into danger. It immediately begins taking…

DURING A professional snowmobiling race in 2008, Mike Schultz lost control of his machine while speeding over a ragged stretch of snow. His left foot hit the ground so hard that his leg hyperextended nearly all the way in the wrong direction, shattering his knee and forcing doctors to amputate just above the joint. “I'm looking at my wife saying, ‘What are we going to do now?’” Schultz says. “I'm a professional athlete, and I'm not going to be able to do this stuff anymore.” Schultz's instinct was right: Conventional prosthetic legs couldn't stand up to his high-impact lifestyle. So in early 2009, he designed and built a limb that could. Its key feature was the Moto Knee, which uses an adjustable 250psi mountain bike shock absorber to regulate the…

I'M ON A SMALL BOAT. A woman in a bikini stands next to me dumping gallons of blood into the sea. Beside her, a man in board shorts strings barracuda heads onto large fishhooks as crooked as a witch's finger, and in front of him, toward the bow, an engineer fiddles with an instrument that looks like a cross between a model rocket and a giant hypodermic needle. I'm covered in fish guts. We are in the Bahamas, in a marine preserve, fishing for sharks. We have a research permit to do what's otherwise illegal in this country, but the boat and its crew have a rough, paranoid quality to them, everyone as superstitious as pirates. Since I came on board, we haven't had a single strike. The ocean seems…

Last year, scientists in Germany set out to create the heaviest known element in the universe: element 119. For five months, they attempted to fuse the atoms of two lighter elements to form one large atom with 119 protons in its nucleus. Like other artificially created superheavy elements (those with 103 or more protons), element 119 will decay in a fraction of a second. Scientists strive to make ever-heavier elements to win acclaim (U.S. and Soviet scientists battled over their discoveries frequently during the Cold War) and to understand the processes that govern the behavior of atomic nuclei. Since wrapping up their experiment at the end of the year, the German researchers have been sifting through terabytes of data for a hint of element 119. If they find proof, the…

ONE SUMMER, a young engineer walked into Austin's Park, an amusement center outside the Texas capital, and introduced himself to the manager as an intern from Waterloo Labs—a hacking collaborative sponsored by the engineering juggernaut National Instruments. He and his colleagues wanted to convert the go-kart track into a real-life, crash-happy version of the classic videogame series Mario Kart. The manager didn't just agree. He lent him a kart. In Super Mario Kart, cartoon drivers zoom around a track littered with interactive objects. Some boost a player's speed, others hijack steering, and many can be launched at competitors. Four interns at Waterloo Labs grew up playing the game, so when someone suggested making a real-world version, they couldn't resist. “We weren't entirely sure how we were going to do it,”…

Biology's equivalent of an office copier is a PCR machine. PCR, short for polymerase chain reaction, is now a staple in crime-scene forensics, heredity tests, and organism hijacking. It's a mind-boggling feat. Among billions of base pairs that make up DNA's genetic code, PCR finds exact sequences and, in a couple of hours, makes billions of copies—enough to decode or splice together useful combinations of genes. Professional machines cost about $10,000 dollars each, but Russell Durrett has devised one from PVC pipes, a 150-watt lightbulb, a computer fan, a cheap microcontroller, and a few reagents he ordered online. Stack five pieces of PVC piping to form a silo [right] that holds vials of DNA, heats them with a lightbulb, and cools them with a computer fan. TOP Drill a dozen…

Q:When did people start inventing things in the garage? short answer Right after they invented the garage. long answer The modern garage first appeared in the 1920s, and inventors—of automobile parts, among other things—began to occupy them almost immediately. Walt and Roy Disney started making cartoons in a Hollywood garage in 1923; eight years later, an engineer named Gerhard Fisher started building his Metallascope metal detectors in a garage in Palo Alto, California; and in 1938, William Hewlett and David Packard rented their own garage space in Palo Alto. The Hewlett-Packard garage would become the most famous in the history of American entrepreneurship. In 1989, it was designated the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley,” an official state landmark. Still, the archetype of the “garage inventor”—and indeed the phrase itself—did not catch…

At the edges of the visible universe, 45 billion light years away, sit some of the oldest known galaxies. How they formed and developed is a mystery, but a spectrograph installed on Chile's Very Large Telescope—functional since March—should help astronomers find answers. The six-foot-wide, three-ton instrument contains 24 motorized robotic arms. Each eight-inch arm controls a mirror that focuses on a single galaxy. As a result, the telescope can collect infrared readings for 24 galaxies at the same time—data that show what they looked like when the universe was only a fraction of its current age. With the simultaneous observations, astronomers can perform faster and more precise statistical comparisons between galaxies than with isolated viewings.…

Nothing hits the spot after a long hike more than a beer, but lugging a six-pack through the wilderness isn't as appealing. Brewers have toyed with portable beer concentrates before—by evaporating the water from finished brews. But along with the water go the hops, which impart flavor. Pat Tatera of Pat's Backcountry Beverages developed a process to brew concentrate instead of beer. With seltzer—the company also sells a $30 carbonator bottle—campers can turn one pouch of it into a pint of full-flavored pale ale. Tatera's brewing process starts like that of any ale. He boils water and malt to create wort—unfermented beer—then cools the mixture and adds yeast to ferment it. Instead of finishing the brew there, he builds a concentrate. He vacuum distills the mixture and reserves the ethanol,…

EVERY YEAR, cars become more sophisticated. They can adapt to the speed of traffic, generate power from braking, and even park themselves. But the roads are pretty much made of the same stuff that was under your grandparents' wheels, even though today we drive an average of 13,000 miles a year. Not since the 1800s, when we started replacing dirt and rocks with asphalt, has the driving surface seen a major change. But now, inventors, designers, and engineers are trying to make roads more useful, more visible, and less expensive. The cost of energy is a major factor. Cash-strapped communities in the United States and Europe are so desperate to cut costs that they've recently started shutting off streetlights, even though lighting has been shown to reduce accidents. Jacksonville, Florida;…

Because one cell has so little DNA, scientists typically pool together millions of cells to sequence a genome. Last December, Xiaoliang Sunney Xie and colleagues at Harvard University developed a technique to carefully copy single genes and then rapidly duplicate and sequence them using existing methods. Trumping other techniques for sequencing single cells, the new method covers up to 93 percent of a cell's DNA. When scientists sequence together a group of cells, they can miss the mutations that make each cell unique—mutations that can also serve as important signs of disease. People may use the new technique to more quickly identify cancer cells, administer less invasive prenatal tests, perform personalized medicine, or even identify a suspect from a single cell left at a crime scene.…

JOHN MCGINNIS thinks ordinary families would rather skip the airport and fly themselves. So he is trying to reinvent the personal airplane with the help of his father, son, and a rotating crew of about two dozen volunteers. Unlike small aircraft today—which can cost more than a house—McGinnis says Synergy could be cheaper, quieter, and, at more than 40 mpg, three times as fuel-efficient. McGinnis, a 47-year-old composite manufacturer, flew his first airplane in second grade. Perplexed by the inefficiencies of personal aircraft, he taught himself aeronautical engineering and fluid dynamics over two decades. One day, while perusing scientific studies at a desk in his daughters' bedroom, he read a NASA researcher's paper challenging a classic aerodynamic drag equation. McGinnis could see the possibilities. “I came out of the girls'…

WITHIN HIS FIRST 30 minutes on the job at an aluminum factory in 1999, metalworker Michael Buckman inhaled so many noxious fumes he was sick with bronchitis for three days. As he recovered, Buckman wondered whether a commercial welding helmet could have filtered his breathing air. “I didn't see anything out there like what I was thinking about,” he says. So he set out to build the WindMaker: a helmet that can prevent lung damage. WindMaker draws fresh air from behind the helmet, pushes it through a HEPA-rated filter, and then blows it toward the front, cooling skin while preventing fog on the glass faceplate. A fan near the chin helps expel air, blowing away toxic smoke in the work zone. LED lights on each side of the faceplate illuminate…

BRIAN ROE SPENT nearly a decade building animatronic monsters for films such as Virus, A.I., and Scooby Doo 2. Then, almost overnight, Hollywood abandoned mechanical characters for computer renderings. Roe now works as a technology consultant, but with the surge of cheap, user-friendly microelectronics, he saw a market emerging for hobbyist robots. “It used to be that electronics and software were out of reach,” Roe says. “Over the past six or eight years, it has completely switched.” So Roe began developing a low-cost kit to teach anyone robotics. He calls his work-in-progress Roy the Robot. For now, Roy is a head, neck, and pair of lower arms. Yet, with about 1,200 parts controlled by animatronics software, the robot already looks and moves like a human. Roe laser-cut the robot's frame…

The America Invents Act went into full effect in March, overhauling the U.S. patent system while launching programs designed to help independent inventors. Patent commissioner John Calvert explains what to look for in a new legal era for innovation. How does the America Invents Act help small-time entrepreneurs? Section 28 started an ombudsman program to offer assistance before, during, and after an applicant gets to the patent office. Section 32 says the patent office must encourage property-law associations to form pro bono programs to assist financially under-resourced inventors and small businesses. Right now, we have four up and running: in Minnesota, Colorado, the D.C. metropolitan area, and California. How does the new first-to-file application system affect inventors? It's really not a huge change from what we were doing. A lot…

When tinkerers want to collaborate, trade tips, or just hang out, many head to communal workshops called hackerspaces. Hardware guru Limor Fried explains how such groups drive a different kind of innovation. How are hackerspaces valuable to innovation? Each hackerspace is different. Some have businesses, others share via open-source licenses, and many are workshop-focused. The best way to get innovation happening is to get a lot of smart people working together—that's the DNA of a hackerspace. Does open collaboration interfere with mainstream measures of success, such as patenting and licensing? I don't think innovation is all about filing patents. In the biggest industries, like server technology, open source clearly drives a lot of innovation. Twitter, Facebook, and Google were all founded using open-source software. I believe the open approach is…

Shark behavior is one of the great mysteries of the ocean, and mediocre tags are primarily to blame. Scientists can't understand something they can't measure. Compared with other marine-animal tags, the HammerTag, now in prototype, is cheaper by hundreds of dollars, lasts years longer, and stores up to a thousand times more data. It can record a shark's entire life, and when the shark dies, it will detach—via explosive charge—and float to the surface to make a final data dump. NOSE CONE The nose cone connects the tag to the shark. It remains attached to the shark even after the micro-charge blows. EXPLOSIVE CHARGE When the device senses that a shark has stopped moving, meaning it's dead, it triggers a micro-charge to fire. The charge separates the bulk of the…

Engineers built the plane's ultralight skeleton by layering sheets of carbon fiber into struts and spars. Light and rigid foam forms the wing tips and insulates the gondolas and cockpit. The plane's long, thin wing spans 69 yards. The length reduces drag, maximizing aerodynamic efficiency, and also provides ample surface area for 10,748 solar cells. Made from monocrystalline silicon just 150 microns thick, the solar cells cover 239 square yards of the plane. They convert sunlight to electricity at an efficiency of 22 percent. Because of its wingspan and low speed—about 43 miles per hour—the plane can bank only up to five degrees, much less than a conventional aircraft. The Omega Instrument precisely measures bank angles and vibrates the control wheel if the pilot banks the craft too hard. Only…

Drivers grab RFID-tagged toys to gain an advantage. The team wrote software that interprets the strength of each tag's signal as a function of distance. This way, a driver passing close to someone holding a speed-boosting toy, for example, wouldn't earn an extra kick as well. The red shell slows down a driver and jams steering. Air pistons attached to the front wheel's tie rods lock it in place, while another piston depresses the brake pedal. A driver who captures a green shell can stuff it into an air cannon and then launch it toward an opponent to fully stop his kart. Plastic bananas cause one tie-rod piston to contract and another to expand, forcing the front wheels to the right on the left-aiming track. “We figured that would be…

Every family has an unofficial IT guy or girl. When printers won't print or files can't be found, the odds are good, dear reader, that you're the one answering relatives' panicked distress calls. Unfortunately, troubleshooting can lead to head-banging frustration for both you and your less savvy kin. There's an easy fix: Download remote-access software—a program that connects you to a faraway computer so that you see exactly what the other person sees. Even better, you can control that person's machine with your own mobile device. Instead of a maddeningly slow back-and-forth dialogue, you can take the reins and work some magic directly. What might this cost you? Nothing if you choose the right product. LogMeIn Free and TeamViewer, for example, offer free remote access on Windows and Mac (the…

Q:Why aren't hovercraft more useful? short answer Blame the skirts. long answer The inventor of the modern hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell, once imagined that his vehicle would cross the Atlantic at 100 miles per hour, an ocean liner coasting on air. While small hovercraft still serve a role in recreation and military landings, Cockerell's dream of hover liners is now defunct. The last significant commercial hovercraft service—which traversed the English Channel and carried 1.25 million passengers annually at its peak—was discontinued in 2000. What sank it? First, the fuel costs were prohibitive. The vehicle's four Rolls-Royce engines consumed 1,200 gallons of fuel per hour. That was fine during the 1950s and 1960s, when fuel was very cheap, but the costs became more burdensome. The Neoprene skirt that encircled the craft created…