june 2009

The retro-futuristic design of this skateboard was inspired by the look of rocket ships in old cartoons. Ryan Bavetta used a jigsaw to cut out the sleek deck and then mounted a propeller and 3.7-horsepower engine from a model airplane on the back to power it. A handheld remote controls the engine throttle, which can move the board 25 mph or more wherever he wants to go.

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You'll save some energy turning your computer off for an hour, but those modest energy gains might come at the expense of your computer's longevity. To figure out just how much energy an average computer consumes during its various states of use, we asked Harvard University physicist Wolfgang Rueckner to run a few tests on his 2005 iMac G5.

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Yes, but probably not anytime soon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the planet's average air temperature could warm by as much as 11.5°F by the end of the century. As a result, the world could be warmer than it was 55 million years ago, says Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees, an analysis of hundreds of climate studies that reads like a nonfiction version of The Day after Tomorrow. Back then, the Canadian Arctic was as balmy as Florida and lousy with crocodile-like animals called champsosaurs.

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This winter, Russian scientists will resume drilling into what may be the most pristine environment in the world: Lake Vostok, an unfrozen body of freshwater the size of Lake Ontario cut off from the world for millennia beneath two miles of Antarctic ice. The sediment on the lakebed could hold clues to past climate changes, and the waters could be teeming with new forms of life — but the slightest mistake could spoil the lake for good.

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This Little Piggie Had Ebola

In January, the Ebola virus leapt from pigs to farmers in the Philippines. Butdon't panic. Despite being a cousin of the deadly African strains, this one, Ebola-Reston, merely causes flu-like symptoms in humans, says Pierre Rollin, a biologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To be safe, the Philippine government ordered farmers to euthanize 6,500 pigs from infected farms. Ebola-Reston was first seen in Philippine monkeys in 1989 and has since passed to other species. Scientists think contagious bats urinated in pigs' water supply, and the swine then coughed the virus onto humans.

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"The simple headline here is that Google is making us smarter," says Gary Small of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California at Los Angeles. Thank you, Dr. Small. And thank you, Internet, for not only helping me dig up this information but also juicing up my brain while I looked for it. Small recently published results showing that searching the Internet does for the brains of older folks what doing bench presses does for chest muscles.

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Dolphins are elegant swimmers, but waterlily leaf beetle larvae take first place for the simplest stroke. The insect just arches its back to manipulate a basic physics principle that lets it glide across water. Now engineers have borrowed this technique to make a tiny boat that could autonomously patrol water reservoirs for months on just a watch battery.

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Football championships, coaches say, are won during preseason workouts. So football players, from high-schoolers up to the pros, report to mini-camps every summer to run windsprints and engage in full-contact drills. Broken bones and blown-out knees are the typical player's biggest concern, but 39 football players, mostly high-schoolers, have died from overheating since 1995.

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Carlos Owens had handled all kinds of machines as an army mechanic, but he always dreamed of using those skills for one project: his own "mecha,” a giant metal robot that could mirror the movements of its human pilot.

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