Sean Captain

The Big Picture: It's nearly impossible to imagine making meaningful carbon dioxide reductions without designing safer, cleaner reactors and rolling them out immediately — because no one wants to build more of the reactors we have today.

Where We Are Now: 372 GW

What We Need by 2050: 700 GW
Tech to Watch: Next-generation Nuclear

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A $19,000 piano might not seem recession-friendly. But it’s a bargain when it’s nearly indistinguishable from one that costs $100,000 more. The sole difference: The discount grand is digital.

Sound emanates from the entire body of the Yamaha AvantGrand, just as it does from a traditional, handbuilt grand’s vibrating strings. Four separate sets of speakers, each complete with high-pitched tweeters and thumping woofers, play tones recorded from cor-responding locations on an actual piano. That outdoes other digital models, which replicate notes from only two positions.

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Every year, 800,000 Americans elect to have a tiny metal-mesh tube inserted into their coronary artery to prop it open and improve blood flow to cardiac muscle tissue. It's an easy choice — the alternative entails cracking open the chest and operating on a stopped heart. The tube, or stent, is permanent, but the vessel hardens over it within months. After that, it becomes a nuisance. The metal blocks x-rays and MRI scans, and it can catch blood cells and form a dangerous clot. Now medical-equipment manufacturer Abbot Laboratories has developed a stent that opens the artery and then simply disintegrates.

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The stunning colors and contrast on the Samsung Show's 3.2-inch OLED screen would be enough to make it a multimedia wonder. But the phone really earns its name from an integrated projector that displays 100-inch images.

Other "pico" projectors are themselves bigger than iPods and attach to a cellphone with a cable. By squeezing a projector into the phone, Samsung ensures that you always have a big screen handy—say, for viewing movies on an airplane seat back or photos on a tabletop.

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We all swooned when Canon brought 1080p video recording to the Eos 5D Mark II cameras and showed off the gorgeous footage. But unless you're a pro photographer who can get a tax write-off for it, how likely are you to shell out $2700 for the Mark II? Now, Canon brings HD goodness to the entry level with the $800 Rebel T1i. (Fortunately, Canon's products are more user-friendly than their names are.)

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Stanley Bostitch created the Hurriquake nail in 2006 to save homes from two great natural threats—high-winds and shaky ground. Redesigning this humble building component—and adding just 15 bucks dollars to the cost of a home—makes houses twice as likely to survive a hurricane and makes them 50 percent tougher against earthquakes. This innovation swept the Hurriquake to our innovation of the year award in 2006.

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Though always known for its odd, over-the-top exhibits, CES took the cake this year by featuring a full TV sound studio--inside Sony's already-massive booth. The studio featured the brand-new set design for Jeopardy, the nerd television institution owned by Sony Pictures that was celebrating its 25th season by filming its "Celebrity Jeopardy!" and "Tournament of Champions" editions, which began airing last week.

That gave us a chance at CES to meet up with geek-god Alex Trebek (who just gets better-looking every year) to talk about TV, tech, and trivia. Trebek claims to be a technology dinosaur, saying he doesn't even know what model cellphone he carries. But we weren't buying it. The guy's been working in electronic television since the age of the dinosaurs-well actually, 1961, when he started at the Canadian Broadcasting Company. But he remains a master of the medium-dreaming of how his show will look on OLED sets and in 3D.

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Making good on a promise from December, start-up battery maker Boston-Power announced today that its almost-too-good-to-be-true Sonata lithium-ion batteries are now for sale, as upgrades for HP laptops.

Boston-Power's claims are impressive: A Sonata cell promises to charge to 40 percent capacity in just 10 minutes (say, the airport wait time from when they start boarding first class until they get to your steerage section). And they reach 80 percent capacity in just 30 minutes.

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How could a technology be failing if it performs better and costs less than its competitor? That's probably what plasma TV makers keep asking themselves, and one we're been thinking about since both Pioneer and Vizio pulled out of the business last month. So we asked a few folks in the biz for their thoughts.

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