inventions

I cannot even think about this long enough to make a joke: Japanese scientists have developed stink-free underwear for astronauts to wear for extended periods in space.

Also in today's links: a link between obesity and ADHD, a debate over the population of the Galapagos, and a remarkable climate-change contrarian.

It's like something out of a science fiction novel or a Harry Potter book. Engineers from Duke University have constructed a device that can "cloak" items placed on a mirror surface.

First designed in 2006, the new version of the device is a more sophisticated and complicated design that can cloak a wider variety of waves.

A team of coal miners is working hundreds of feet underground when an explosion rocks the tunnel. They scramble for an exit, but those are all blocked. The air fills with dust and gas. There's no escape ... so the survivors inflate a portable panic room, complete with an oxygen supply and air filters, and wait for help. At least that's how Jim Reuther, a senior research scientist at the R&D giant Battelle, hopes the situation pans out.

A team of coal miners is working hundreds of feet underground when an explosion rocks the tunnel. They scramble for an exit, but those are all blocked. The air fills with dust and gas. There's no escape ... so the survivors inflate a portable panic room, complete with an oxygen supply and air filters, and wait for help. At least that's how Jim Reuther, a senior research scientist at the R&D giant Battelle, hopes the situation pans out.

Think that college lab work is dull and uninspiring? Student inventors claimed a $25,000 grand prize and other awards Wednesday night for creating antibacterial agents, "plastic steel," and a spherical robot that can climb stairs.

The winners were contestants in the 2008 Collegiate Inventors Competition, operated by the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation since 1990.

It looks like the father of modern physics had more up his sleeve than the theory of relativity. Long after he changed the landscape of modern physics, Albert Einstein and his former student Leo Szilard patented a refrigerator that had no moving parts and used only pressurized gases for cooling. It got overshadowed 20 years later, in the 1950s, when more efficient, if environmentally-damaging, freon-compressors for refrigerators became available.

K3 Promoter
Cost to Develop: $100,000
Time: 8 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Gordon Link, a diabetic and foot amputee, is not looking to climb Mount Everest, run a marathon, or snowboard off a cliff. I just want to walk without stumbling like Im a drunk, he says. It may not sound like a tall order, but until he was fitted with a prototype prosthetic foot that simulates the bodys natural movements, walking on uneven ground was like navigating an obstacle course. Hitting a low spot of even one inch with my old foot was like a non-amputee stepping into a four-inch hole, he adds. Not good.

The Kanzius RF Field Generator
Cost to Develop: $1 million+Time: 5 yearsPrototype | | | | | Product

When a man with no medical degree and a diagnosis of fatal leukemia builds a cancer-curing machine in his garage, you might think it merely the desperate attempt of a dying man to escape his fate. And youd be right. The weird thing is, it just might work.

Uno
Cost to Develop: $45,000
Time: 2 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Just before his plane dipped into the clouds above Beijing International Airport two years ago, Ben Gulak caught the last clear view of the sun that he would see for two weeks. On the ground, the 17-year-old, who was on a family trip to China, quickly spotted a source for much of the thick haze hanging over the city: smog-spewing motorbikes. Thousands of them, everywhere. “Right then,” he says, “I decided that I wanted to create an alternative mode of transportation, something clean and compact.”

Viper
Cost to Develop: $250,000Time: 2 yearsPrototype | | | | | Product
If were ever going to see a true era of commercial space travel—a day when Virgin Galactic is just another spaceline—Tim Bendel believes we need a better rocket engine. Specifically, something that is to the space industry what the internal combustion engine was to the nascent car industry a century ago: a standard, off-the-shelf option that can power any manner of vehicle, from tourist ship to lunar lander. And it has to be affordable to companies not owned by billionaire Richard Branson.

Bel-Air
Cost to Develop: $236,000
Time: 1 year
Prototype | | | | | Product
Your home could be emitting toxic gases. Just ask the victims of Hurricane Katrina, whose emergency trailers, made with glue-laden particleboard, let off so much formaldehyde that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that residents should spend time outdoors and make relocating to permanent housing a priority. Even in more expensive new homes, the concentration of emissions from things like furniture, carpet and paint can be two to five times as high as it is outdoors. But most air filters only catch particulates such as dust and pollen rather than organic compounds like formaldehyde and benzene, and the filters that do trap those gases need frequent replacement. So Mathieu LeHanneur and David Edwards built an ultra-efficient filtration system that eliminates toxins using natures own hazmat squad: plants.

Sky Serpent
Cost to Develop: $250,000
Time: 9 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Today’s largest wind farms are the size of small towns, made up of turbines 30 stories tall with blades the size of 747 wings. Those behemoths produce a great deal of power, but manufacturing, transporting, and installing them is both expensive and difficult, and back orders are common as the industry grows by more than 40 percent a year. The solution, says inventor Doug Selsam, is to think smaller: Capture more power with less material by putting 2, 10, someday dozens of smaller rotors on the same shaft linked to the same generator.

InSeT System
Cost to Develop: $475,000
Time: 2 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
In January 2006, an explosion rocked West Virginias Sago coal mine, trapping 13 miners. Rescuers searched an area 500 feet wide by two miles long and didnt reach the miners until 41 hours after the blast, eventually pulling out 12 bodies and one survivor. Jim Ponceroff, who led a rescue team, says that the biggest challenge in recovering miners is locating them quickly so that engineers can drill a borehole for fresh air and, ultimately, rescue. Sago, like most of the countrys nearly 900 active mines, relied on radios that transmit signals over a thin wire thats easily damaged in a cave-in.

Hillman Composite Beams
$500,000
Time: 12 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Last November, John Hillman stood beneath a bridge built with prototype plastic-and-concrete beams of his own design. Then he signaled for his team to release a nine-million-pound coal train. “You can do all the calculations you want; you can do tons of lab testing. But at the end of the day, you run a heavy-axle coal train over the bridge, and that pretty much tells you whether or not it’s gonna hold,” Hillman says. It didn’t budge.

Paragon Diving System
Cost to Develop: $1.2 million
Time: 7 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Diesel oil and raw sewage slowly trickled into Taber MacCallums eyes as he swam toward the sunken research ship hed been called to help salvage. It was 1989, and Hurricane Hugo had devastated Puerto Rico three days before, dumping fuel and municipal waste into San Juan Harbor. As the young diver and analytical chemist worked to raise the ship, the seals on his diving equipment disintegrated in the muck that crept into his helmet. Every time MacCallum exhaled into the putrid water, his helmet let a few drops back in.