Cliff Kuang

Commercial Flight: 2020

The long, skinny tube has to go. Tasked with improving the nation's air transportation, NASA wants airplanes to burn 40 percent less fuel than a 777 by 2020 and 70 percent less by 2030. Not only that, it wants those same planes to be whisper-quiet. The best -- and perhaps the only -- way to reach these ambitious benchmarks is to design commercial planes more like stealth bombers and less like pencils.

In a few years, doctors won’t need to fill the bodies of gastrointestinal-cancer patients with chemotherapy drugs that also kill off normal tissue. Instead, patients will swallow an electronic pill that finds its way to a tumor, dispenses drugs onto it—and only it—and then passes harmlessly from the body. That’s the promise of the iPill, an ingestible capsule being developed by the electronics giant Philips.

Elastic Eyesight: For the 314 million people around the world with blurry vision, just put on a pair of Joshua Silver’s AdSpecs and inject light-bending silicon oil into the plastic lenses until the world comes back into focus. Since winning a POPULAR SCIENCE Best of What’s New Award in 2000, Silver has been perfecting his $20 adjustable-prescription specs and, with help from the U.S. military, has handed out 20,000 pairs around the world.

As a child growing up in northern China, Yan Xiao loved flying kites. A born engineer, he made them himself out of paper sails and plain bamboo frames. The kites were durable and cheap. Xiao left China at age 22 to study civil engineering in Japan and the U.S. but returned as a visiting professor at Hunan University in 2002. On a trip to the region’s vast bamboo forests, the memory of those kites gave the 47-year-old Xiao a flash of inspiration: Bamboo was strong enough for kites, but he suspected that it could be fortified to make even sturdier things, like bridges and houses.

“John was always into the military,” says Brian Hart. He and his wife, Alma, were hoping their son would go to college, “but when 9/11 happened, he was sure,” Hart recalls. “He wanted to serve.” John enlisted in September 2002 at age 19, drawing a place in the 173rd Airborne Brigade. By July, he was on the front line in Iraq and quickly realized that the Army had come to war unprepared. “He called me and said, ‘Dad, we need body armor. Can you help?’” The next week, October 18, 2003, John and his commanding officer were killed in their unarmored humvee during a roadside ambush.

“John was always into the military,” says Brian Hart. He and his wife, Alma, were hoping their son would go to college, “but when 9/11 happened, he was sure,” Hart recalls. “He wanted to serve.” John enlisted in September 2002 at age 19, drawing a place in the 173rd Airborne Brigade. By July, he was on the front line in Iraq and quickly realized that the Army had come to war unprepared. “He called me and said, ‘Dad, we need body armor.