future tech

The blaring techno, waifish models and $10 cocktails all seemed appropriate for a book release party/fashion show, but one thing was truly different from your usual runway moment: the clothes. Designer Diana Eng has become famous for her blend of style and science, mixing technology into her accessories and clothes whenever possible. PopSci.com attended her recent release party, and brought back some photos of the fierce fashion geekery.

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Professional thieves beware! In addition to motion sensors, security cameras, flood lights, rent-a-cops and Doberman pinchers, there’s a new piece of technology designed specifically to ruin your day. And to make matters worse, it’s invisible. Well, not exactly invisible, but stare right at it and you won’t realize it’s there. Worried? Thanks to a novel new motion sensor developed by the Fraunhofer Institutes for Applied Polymer Research IAP in Potsdam-Golm, Germany, you should be.

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We've all got the drawer. It has an indiscriminate collection of electronic connections, cords, and chargers for devices we haven't used in a decade and couldn't give away on eBay for free. But we guard that drawer with Obamian hope that the next purchase might actually require a serial port connection or that dot-matrix printers might hold the key to cold fusion. We wait for just one occasion to justify our persistence and silence throughout decades of shrieks from our significant others. It's likely that within that drawer are somewhere between six and ten cell phone chargers, one perhaps still connected through its one-of-a-kind connection to that swanky new flip phone you bought in 1999. We understand. We too have such a drawer, or cabinet or garage. But together, today, it's time to let go, just a little bit.

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One of the most promising technologies for the aspiring outer-space commuter is the space elevator. The concept, like quite a few others, was pressed into the public imagination by Arthur C. Clarke, who in his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise described a incredibly thin, incredibly strong carbon filament with one end anchored on Earth and the other extending up to a satellite in geostationary orbit. Now, a group of Japanese scientists are convinced that they can build a space elevator more quickly and cheaply than has been believed possible.

Such a cable could convey cargo into space very cheaply and easily. Carriages would travel up and down the cable under modest power, not the vast expenditures of energy that are currently needed to send anything into orbit.

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Big-money competitions—like the $25-million Virgin Earth Challenge to suck carbon from the atmosphere and the $10-million Progressive Automotive X Prize to build a 100mpg car—are a great way to inspire life-changing technologies. Winning strokes the ego, of course, and eight-figure prize money is also a good lure. But what if you need some innovative ideas, only you don’t have a lot of prize money to throw around? Hand out course credit instead.

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What started as an academic problem in a robotics class—how to build a robot that can hop like a pogo stick, roll on wheels, and walk up stairs—has grown into a concept that could one day help with search-and-rescue missions.

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The ultimate in green living is almost here. Think bus shelters, street lamps, and even houses -- all grown from trees. The process of shaping living trees to create objects, referred to as arborsculpture and pooktre, is well known among hobbyists (a simple Web search shows plenty of results for the art form). Now, researchers at Israel's Tel Aviv University are teaming up with eco-living company Plantware to create commercial structures on a larger scale.

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Ever wished you could have Harry Potter's invisibility cloak? Science, not magic, could make that a reality. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have created materials that have the potential to bend light and even redirect it around themselves, cloaking any object behind them. They are metamaterials, materials that gain unusual properties via their structures. While all materials found in nature have a positive refractive index, these man-made metamaterials have a negative one.

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