bullet trains

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.

Jack Handy once mused that if you drop your keys into molten lava, you should probably just let them go. Apparently, the same is true for cellphones dropped into toilets on trains. As first reported on the BBC, a 26-year old Frenchman got stuck up to the shoulder in a high speed TGV train toilet after dropping his cellphone into the bowl.

The BBC article claims the victim “fell afoul of the suction system,” but some think that claim is either incorrect or raises more questions than answers.

At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, no sprinter could compete for attention, let alone swiftness, with the newly opened Shinkansen, or "bullet train," which ran between Tokyo and Osaka at 125 miles an hour. A worldwide race to increase train speeds has been on ever since. France´s record-setting TGV operates at a top speed of 218 mph, but with the Fastech 360, East Japan Railway stands to become to railroads what Jesse Owens was to footraces.