Dj Vu
What It Is: Wait, haven't you read this before? I swear, it was in some magazine last week. No, really.

The New York Times reports today that Google and IBM are sinking $30 million into a two-year project to build remote data centers that can handle sophisticated computing research remotely. No World of Warcraft player will again be safe now that students can crunch probabilities with the 1600+ processors Google is installing in an undisclosed location.

But seriously: the two companies—along with six universities (Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington)—are cooperating to get an inadequately funded area of research off the ground. The Times succinctly defines "cloud-computing" as a "new kind of data-intensive supercomputing" that "often involves scouring the
Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and
insights." It's typically used by major corporations to analyze web traffic and refine big systems, but now any university kid with a password will be able to create programs and software that can take advantage of the horsepower Google and IBM are providing. —Jacob Ward

How do you prevent insurgents from shooting down choppers? How do you keep a cast from itching? How do you reinvent the brick? You sketch. And then you work: nights, weekends-for years, if you have to. You blow all your money, then beg for more. You build prototypes, and when they fail, you build more. Why? Because inventing is about solving problems, and not stopping until your solution becomes real.

Deep Toad

Every so often, news of a mysterious creature at Loch Ness comes trickling out of Scotland. Usually these Nessie sightings come in the form of an odd blurry shape in the background of a tourists family photo, disappointing monster hunters everywhere when yet another floating hunk of twigs and lake kelp, or perhaps a runaway inflatable raft, is pulled from the deep. Its not often, however, that irrefutable evidence of life in Loch Ness comes from a source as highly esteemed as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A team from MIT was conducting a sonar scan to map the lake floor recently when it ran across an unexpected beast: a common toad. Rather than the toad itself being mysterious, though, scientists were more in awe of its diving abilities. It was spotted crawling around in the mud 324 feet below the surface, which apparently is pretty deep for an amphibian and well below the depth at which the researchers were expecting to find anything other than your standard bottom-dwelling fish, mollusks and supersized swimming dinosaur-lizard hybrids. Maybe the MIT team should ask the toad if its seen anything suspicious lately . . . —Bjorn Carey

How would you design an aircraft if your main aim were to keep its roar from waking up the entire neighborhood during takeoffs and landings?

Domo

It knows its own strength

Though it may not look it, Domo is the first robot built to give a hug.

Conspiracy theorists, beware: That aluminum foil beanie-headwear believed, since at least the 1950s, to stop brain-control rays-may make it easier for The Man to read your mind, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology grad students. Inspired by fringe beliefs that invasive radio signals can probe citizens´ thoughts and that wearing foil on your head may fend them off, an experiment by four Ph.D. candidates found that certain key frequencies-owned by the Feds, naturally-are actually enhanced by such â€protection.â€

Back in the 1960s and '70s, legions of scientists explored technologies to zap strength from hurricanes. Those efforts were scrapped both because experiments were inconclusive and because the cost of deploying a full-scale system to regularly battle the cyclones would have been staggering. In light of
Katrina and Rita's $200-billion-plus swath of destruction-and a forecast of even more violent and catastrophic hurricanes to come-that steep price tag now seems like a bargain, and
scientists are once again entertaining schemes to mitigate monster storms.

Congratulations are in order for two alums of POPSCIs Brilliant 10-geophysicist Michael Manga (Brilliant 10 class of 2003) of the University of California at Berkeley and laser physicist Claire Gmachl (Brilliant 10 class of 2004) of Princeton University-each of whom was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur "genius" grant on September 20.

Tony Rose

Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada

All computers lock up or crash, and no operating system is immune (as a matter of fact, we crashed once as we wrote this answer), but singling out specific reasons oversimplifies the issue, explains Daniel Jackson, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The underlying cause, Jackson says, is that hardware and software developers are trying to bring products to market in "Internet time"-that is, hyperfast. The result: Quality and reliability suffer.