march 2011

Marijuana’s fibrous cousin hemp has a long history with auto makers. in 1941 Henry Ford unveiled a car body made primarily out of organic fibers, hemp included. seventy years later, the world’s first production-ready biocomposite electric car—with hemp as the “bio”—will finally hit the streets. The Kestrel, a three-door hatchback, is made of a “hemp composite as strong as the fiberglass in boats, yet incredibly lightweight,” says Nathan Armstrong, the president of Motive industries, Kestrel’s manufacturer.

Inside this salt crystal, which weighs just two tenths of a gram, is an ancient ecosystem: 30,000-year-old bacteria and the genetic material of long-dead algae and fungi. Such evidence is crucial to understanding how organisms evolve, explains J. Koji Lum of Binghamton University. Last summer, a team of researchers led by Lum and his colleague Tim Lowenstein extracted the still-living bacteria along with the DNA from ancient fungi and single-celled algae.

Last December, New York University art professor and technophile Wafaa Bilal had a magnetic camera mount installed in his head in a painful two-hour procedure. The device is held in place by three titanium posts and a subdermal plate placed one fifth of an inch beneath his skin. Once a minute for the next year, a coin size USB camera will photograph the often mundane view from the back of his head—525,948 photos in all, which can be seen at www.3rdi.me.

What's New

• The Goods: March 2011's Hottest Gadgets
• Matchbook-Sized Computer Creates Your Own In-Goggle Display
• The Nissan Juke Is Less a Family Hauler Than a Quick, Efficient, Gizmo-Rich City Car

As we pass through the Strait of Belle Isle and emerge from the shelter of Newfoundland’s lee, the first mate pipes instructions from the bridge: Lash down or stow all belongings. Rough weather ahead. Two decks below in the main lab, Amy Bower loads onto her extra-large monitor what appear to be abstract paintings, giant red and orange blobs in a field of yellow, as her computer reads text aloud in a robotic voice. Nose almost touching the screen, she searches for clues in the colorful abstractions, which are in fact oversized topographical maps of the Labrador Sea.

A senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, Bower is the chief scientist on the first leg of voyage 192, as it’s officially called—a search for the hidden weather that roils beneath the sea. She also happens to suffer from not one but two congenital diseases: macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. She is legally blind. But in her 22 years as an oceanographer, she’s confronted winter storms on the North Atlantic and Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. With the help of her computer and other instruments, Bower can see the ocean far more clearly than most of us.

In 2003, scientists with the Human Genome Project announced the completion of their 13-year effort to identify the three billion base pairs that form the chemical rungs in DNA’s signature twisted-ladder shape. This first attempt to create a comprehensive map of a human biological system was more than just a breakthrough for geneticists, though. It also marked the launch of a new era of “-omic”-based research, in which biologists began shifting their attention from the individual parts within a system to studying the system itself.

According to some estimates, smartphones—packed with personal data, always connected, and largely unsecured—are now being infected with viruses at twice the rate of PCs. Malware disguised as a legitimate app can steal account information and direct your phone to call or text expensive premium-rate numbers or to send spam texts to your contacts. Links, which are often cut off in phone browsers (making suspicious ones hard to spot), can send users to sites embedded with malware.

Phytoplankton are essential for almost all life on Earth; the minuscule photosynthetic marine organisms anchor the oceans’ food chain while also producing about half the oxygen on the planet. We know very little about them, though, in part because studying phytoplankton blooms as they drift across the sea is difficult.

The Trend

Until now, bandwidth-hungry mobile apps often needed Wi-Fi to back up their connection. Now Verizon’s Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is setting devices free.

Why Now

Verizon is broadcasting its new 4G network at 700 megahertz, its own segment of the wireless spectrum. This space lets even large high-def files transmit quickly in two directions, perfect for video conferences. Currently in 38 cities, covering about one third of the population, LTE towers are expected to provide nationwide broadband by 2013.

How You'll Benefit

Never look down at your GPS again; instead, glance at a dashboard inside your goggles. Recon Instruments’s second-gen micro computer snaps into goggles and shows vitals—directions, text messages, nearby friends—on an internal display.

Last November, Mario Garcia was walking toward the backyard of the Escondido, California, home where he worked as a gardener when he stepped on what looked like white powder and heard a boom. The substance, it turned out, was hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD), a compound that reacts violently when exposed to heat and friction. Badly burned, Garcia was rushed to the hospital, and when the San Diego hazmat squad searched the house, they found one of the largest caches of homemade explosives in U.S. history, with several pounds of HMTD and grenades recovered, plus 25 gallons of sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and two guns.