Feature

Let’s start with the bad news: You are saturated with man-made chemicals, some of them toxic. Today’s exposure began when compounds in your shampoo and shaving cream seeped into your skin cells, and during your morning coffee, when you drank chemicals that were released into your brew as hot water ran against the plastic walls of your coffeemaker. It continued all day as you touched industrial chemicals in packaging, or walked through pesticide-sprayed lawns, or cooked dinner on nonstick pans.

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Three test pilots. Two flight surgeons. One molecular biologist. A flight controller, a Pentagon staffer and a CIA intelligence officer. These are the nine people chosen by NASA to be America’s next astronauts. Late this summer they reported to Houston along with two Japanese pilots, a Japanese doctor, a Canadian pilot and a Canadian physicist who will train alongside NASA’s class of 2009. Call them the lucky 14.

Selected from more than 3,500 applicants, NASA’s new astronaut candidates arrive at a pivotal moment in the history of human space exploration. The agency’s bold ambition is to rocket humans beyond the International Space Station for the first time in more than 40 years. The question is when.

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We have a credo around here: The future will be better. It may sound optimistic in light of our wheezing environment and limping economy, but then you haven’t met the Brilliant 10, PopSci’s annual selection of the nation’s most promising young researchers.

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The bright future of green living has been on display for the past two weeks at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during the Department of Energy's 2009 Solar Decathlon. The biennial contest, which wraps up this weekend, brings hundreds of university students from around the world to a temporary solar village for two weeks, where spectators can walk through student-designed houses and marvel at the latest green tech.

These solar homes have it all, including things that aren't commercially available yet -- like self-activating curled-metal shades; walls made of plants, both living and recycled; and roofs that tilt at the sun, making them efficient sun-catchers from Phoenix to Fargo. Worried about efficiency while you're away? How about an iPhone app that controls your entire house?

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As if the universe weren’t strange enough, scientists have recently discovered that entire galaxy clusters—the largest known structures in the universe, consisting of thousands of galaxies—are moving toward the same area. And we have no idea what mysterious phenomenon is drawing them along. Whatever it is, it’s huge. So far, cosmologists’ best guess is that it’s the gravitational pull from something beyond the visible universe. NASA scientist Alexander Kashlinsky and a team of researchers discovered the mystery motion, dubbed “dark flow,” last year.

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Almost every day, we see so-called "upgrades" to technologies that really don't need the extra attention. Plenty of everyday gadgets haven't changed much since they were introduced or invented, because, well, they work just fine the way they are. And trying to improve on something that's already at the top of the food chain is a) a waste of time and b) likely to just make it worse for the wear. Companies need to face facts: there are technologies (like these five) that are practically perfect just as they are.

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Flu season in the Southern Hemisphere is almost over—and now it’s heading back our way. At the time this issue went to press, there were more than 162,000 confirmed cases and 1,154 deaths worldwide from “novel H1N1,” a.k.a. swine flu, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes this figure is a gross underestimate, especially since only a fraction of people who have the flu go to the hospital.

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Just about everyone insists that Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at building weapons. Iran claims it only wants nuclear power. So how do weapons inspectors get at the truth? They study the country’s supply and treatment of uranium, one of the most abundant nuclear materials on the planet.

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While I undoubtedly learned a lot at the Singularity Summit, the conference's greatest benefit was the questions it didn't answer. Unresolved issues regarding the Singularity have provided a lot of philosophical grist for my admittedly limited intellectual mill, and working through those problems has been as exciting as any talk I saw at the Summit.

To wrap up our coverage of the Singularity Summit, I'm going to count down my ten most vexing unanswered questions about Kurzweil's theoretical baby, the eventual merge of human and artificial intellifnece, and I am interested to hear any opinions, questions or (hopefully) answers you all have about any or all of these still unexplained facets of our future.

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Sometimes it takes long, hard study to pin down what we thought we knew all along—and to reveal surprising findings beneath the surface of common sense. Ducks like water? Gamblers don't learn from their mistakes? Shocking!

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