Corey Binns

What happens when you pop a pill? Inside the University of Calgary's $1.5-million virtual-reality room, scientists can don a pair of 3-D goggles and find out in high-definition detail. Biochemist Christoph Sensen and his colleagues have created a virtual human dubbed the CAVEman (for Automated Virtual Environment) that lets them monitor how a virtual body metabolizes medicine.

As firemen prepare for wildfire season this summer, they will reach for their trusty Pulaski ax, the century-old tool used to hack ditches between flames and the rest of the forest. But they will have some new, high-tech help as well. Mini tree-mounted weather stations and airborne infrared sensors will provide the clearest picture yet of where fires are and where they're headed.

Overfishing made the grey nurse shark endangered, but it's the animal's bizarre, cannibalistic embryos that are making it difficult for the species to rebound. The gestating shark pups need a "time out," says Nick Otway, a fisheries biologist at Port Stephens Fisheries Institute in Australia. As a last-ditch effort to keep the species from eating itself into extinction, he built an artificial uterus, a souped-up fish tank that will give each unborn baby its own womb.

What: Brain-Machine Interface by Honda, which lets you control a humanoid with your mind
Where: Tokyo
Why: Disability affects one in five Americans.
Wow: Requires no surgical implants and boasts a 90 percent accuracy rate

What: An exoskeleton that dramatically speeds up recovery times from stroke
Where: Santa Cruz, Calif.
Why: An estimated 780,000 Americans will suffer a debilitating stroke this year.
Wow: The robot can simulate 95 percent of the motions of a healthy human arm.

What: Fluorescence-Assisted Resection and Exploration, a new technique that makes cancerous tissue glow during surgery, one cell at a time
Where: Boston
Why: Of the 1.5 million cases of cancer diagnosed annually, nearly all of them require surgery.
Wow: Pinpoints the spread of cancer in seconds

The charred remains of a multi-million-dollar mansion crumbled under Randall Griffin's work boots. "The entire neighborhood was burned to ashes," he says. "There was literally one home left." Now, less than two years after Griffin surveyed the aftermath of the wildfires that destroyed more than 3,000 homes in Southern California, his group at the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate is testing a deployable tent that could shield homes from the most ferocious fires.