Amanda Schupak

Want a new cellphone? Just press a button. What looks like painted artwork on the Hitachi W61H phone is actually a new E-Ink screen. Unlike LCDs that add bulk to a device, manufacturers can add these screens—just twice the thickness of a hair—as if they were stickers.

Skin guns. Organ printers. Pig dust. Biochemist Alan Russell believes tools like these could one day be standard-issue for the battlefield medic. The skin gun would heal burns. The organ printer would replace badly wounded livers, kidneys, even hearts. And the pig dust?