Instant Expert 2008

Last May, scientists met in Geneva, Switzerland, to update the World Health Organization’s plans for pandemic preparedness. It looks like a crisis could arrive sooner rather than later. Thanks to climate change and drug resistance, a handful of deadly organisms are spreading across the globe; some are poised to make a comeback in the U.S. after decades of absence.

Since the invention of the transistor, silicon semiconductors have been king. But now silicon-based transistors are nearing the limit of their potential. Excess heat and manufacturing hurdles are impeding the development of ever-faster and -smaller processors. Advances in materials and chip design to resist extreme heat and move huge amounts of data, quickly, will be crucial. Experts are exploring three technologies to overcome these challenges: spintronics, graphene and memristors.

The 14-year-long summer on Saturn’s southern side is drawing to a close. August 11, 2009, marks the planet’s vernal equinox, when Saturn’s thin rings line up edge-on with the sun. As this happens, the rings will appear to grow thinner until they completely vanish. Because scattered sunlight won’t obscure the view, it’s a perfect time for NASA’s spacecraft Cassini to answer long-standing questions about Saturn.

Embryonic stem cells, which can be coaxed to turn into any kind of cell type, have been hailed as a 21st-century panacea. But they are fraught with ethical problems because they come from embryos. Last November, two teams of scientists turned ordinary adult skin cells into pluripotent stem cells—capable of becoming any kind of tissue—a feat that could solve the ethical problem forever. Here’s how one group did it.

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in 1960 that “sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms.” Recent research agrees, finding that some sleepers shriek or even gorge themselves without knowing it. These sleep-disorder sufferers experience neural glitches that mix conscious and unconscious states. Scientists are now searching for the physiological underpinnings in hopes of developing better drug therapies.

Launch our gallery of the most bizarre parasomnias here.

Will Brinton, the founder of Woods End Laboratories, a bioenergy consultancy, predicts a future without landfills. Instead we’ll use table scraps and sewage to power our homes. Just dump the waste into a household digester, and bacteria will break it down and release the natural gas methane. Farms could sell their copious poop-based energy supplies back to the grid. But how much energy do animals yield? We ran the numbers and found that you might want to consider a pet elephant.