People around the world guzzle about 50 billion gallons of bottled water a year, and then toss billions of those plastic bottles into the trash heap instead of the recycling bin. Matt Naples and Peter Zummo think they can take this lemon of a fact and turn it into lemonade—or rather, take those discarded water bottles and turn them into chairs, shelves, or houses for the world’s poor.

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Carry a different phone for every situation, whether you’re traveling light or blasting tunes in your car. On its own, Modu is one of the smallest, lightest cellphones yet. But when you want to do more than basic calling, pop it into a new outer shell to give it features like a full keyboard, a wider display or a longer-lasting battery.

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Rip open a Pleo, get the run down on hybrids, and learn about the military's futuristic flying laser gun as Chuck Cage and the editors of PopSci take a behind-the-scenes tour of the third annual How it Works issue. Learn the stories behind the stories of some of the world's most sophisticated machines.

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The annual Toy Industry Association's Toy Fair is every kid’s dream: A whole conference center packed with games, robots, balls, hula hoops, slime guns, Smurfs, and just about any other instrument of fun that you can imagine. Come to think of it, it’s every adult’s dream, too.

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More than a billion people worldwide live in poverty—not a gadget hound's I-can't-afford-an-iPhone poverty, but devastating, living-on-a-dollar-a-day poverty. These folks have trouble paying for food, staying healthy, getting an education, and doing many of the other daily things you and I take for granted. In future postings of this column, we'll discuss new tech that tackles each of these specific problems. But to kick things off, let’s look at a new program that aims at the most obvious problem of the poor: They need more money.

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Undersea cables have made big news in the last few days, ever since several cables were cut last week near Dubai and Alexandria, disrupting Internet service all over the Middle East. (The latest news: It looks like a ship’s anchor sliced one of the cables. Oops!) The accident draws attention to how much our modern lives depend on unseen cables—just three inches thick and buried under sand—that most of us have never even thought about. There are hundreds of thousands of miles of these things snaking under our seas, with even more on the way.

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Forgot your wallet? You’ll need a better excuse than that for passing on the check. By next year, you’ll be able to pay simply by swiping your cellphone a few inches from a cash register, with a new wireless standard called Near Field Communication. An NFC chip in your phone will send your credit-card number—stored on your phone or on the chip—by way of short-distance radio waves. An electronic reader at the checkout will decode the number and ring up your purchase.

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