april 2009

It all has to do with where the cow was milked. "Organic milk often has to travel thousands of miles to reach distribution points," says Dean Sommer, a cheese and food technologist at the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin. To survive the journey and leave time to spare in the fridge, farmers pasteurize organic milk at higher temperatures than conventional milk.

What It Is

GPU computing: Using a PC’s graphics processor to perform other tasks.

Why It’s Radical

The graphics-processing unit (GPU) that normally handles only visual effects is taking over duties from the CPU, the computer’s main chip. CPUs such as Intel’s Core i7 max out at four computing cores. But graphics chips have dozens of cores that, though not as versatile, are ideal for parallel processing—breaking complex tasks into smaller chunks that the many cores work on simultaneously.

After a trip to the Amazon jungle, President Teddy Roosevelt famously reported seeing a pack of piranhas devour a cow in a few minutes. It must have been a very large school of fish—-or a very small cow. According to Ray Owczarzak, assistant curator of fishes at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, it would probably take 300 to 500 piranhas five minutes to strip the flesh off a 180-pound human. But would this attack even happen?

Good news for the 150-million-plus users of Facebook: Now you don’t have to lift a finger to follow your friends. The upcoming Palm Pre and the British-made INQ1 are the first in a new crop of phones designed for constant connection to the social-networking site.

Popular Science celebrates the eternal human urge to go bigger! Better! Stronger! Meet three innovations with the need to exceed.

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.

How do you make a bicycle that never needs lube, never leaves grease on your pants, and always delivers smooth pedaling? Simple: Ditch the chain.

For its new Soho commuter bike, Trek replaced greasy metal links with a dry belt. Unlike other attempts at such bikes, the Soho is silky smooth to pedal. And it’s the first to offer multiple speeds, using an eight-gear transmission inside the rear-wheel hub.