Matt Ransford

The only thing more frustrating than creeping your way toward the site of a bottleneck on the highway only to discover the accident is on the other side of the median are the times when you make it through and discover, as far as you can tell, nothing was holding up the traffic. Japanese researchers have now demonstrated that the "nothing" may in fact be the traffic crossing a threshold of density of cars on the road. Too many cars means that small slow downs by a few drivers equals up to big backups miles away.

So you havent gotten around to donating blood or getting on the bone marrow transplant list or taking a class on CPR. Its time to step up, people. Fortunately for you, you can cross the last one off the list, sort of. The American Heart Association is letting everybody know that even if you arent trained in CPR, jumping in and administering chest compressions if you witness an adult collapse after having a heart attack is more than twice as likely to save his life than just calling 911 alone.

Last fall we reported on the growing mess of garbage swirling in the North Pacific Gyre. Its a swath of ocean arguably the size of the continental U.S. where all the plastic refuse from Asia and the western coast of North America ends up when its washed out to sea. Turtles mistake bags for jellyfish and birds mistake floating chips for prey. Animals have been discovered starved to death because the entire contents of their stomachs were plastic fragments. Sail a boat out to the middle of the gyre and the problem is in plain sight. Unfortunately for us, the more severe problem is the one we cant see.

Farmers in Southern California this summer arent planting as much as they usually would. Its not because of a new government subsidy on corn or soybeans. Its because they wont have enough water with which to irrigate their crops. Is this a crisis for the farmers? Actually, its a crisis for San Diego and neighboring municipalities—theyre buying the water for $16.8 million a year from the Palo Verde Valley to help quench their own droughts. In exchange, the farmers are letting 26,000 acres go fallow this season.

Paul Offit has written an op-ed in todays New York Times which hastens to point out what other news stories have largely misrepresented in the Hannah Poling autism lawsuit: The outcome of the court ruling does not mean the government is admitting to a causal link between childhood vaccines and the onset of autis

About every two years, transistors shrink in size enough to place double the number on an integrated circuit than was possible during the previous two years. Its held true since the mid-1960s when the idea was first posited by Gordon E. Moore (today, its called Moores Law). If you were to plot the rate on a graph, youd see it come out as an exponential curve. Exponential curves start slowly and then ramp up quickly, theoretically approaching a limit but never reaching it. I say theoretically because in the very practical real world, a limit will always be reached due to environmental feedback. In silicon-based computing (what we use today), that limit may be only four years away.

As someone who has broken the same pinky toe three times and fractured my fifth metatarsal once, I can immediately see the appeal of a rug that lights up when you step on it. (I will conveniently neglect to mention that all my breaks happened during the middle of the day.) Invented by two engineering students at London South Bank University, the rug uses electroluminescence to glow under the weight of a footfall.

One of the technologies being touted as the next great thing for our cars is the hydrogen fuel cell. If youve heard anything about them, its that there are no harmful emissions, the only by-product is pure water, straight from your tailpipe. Of course, thats only part of the story. While it is true that your exhaust will be clean, thats only because hydrogen in a cell is not a source of energy the way gasoline naturally is—its a carrier, like a battery. The energy to be stored in the cell has to come from somewhere else. Right now, the sources are the same as theyve always been, relying heavily on fossil fuels. The emissions are simply moved from your exhaust to a power plant.

But what if the hydrogen could be produced with alternative energy sources?

Thomas Edison has been dethroned as the father of recorded sound. The New York Times is today reporting on a find by American audio historians in Paris of a 10-second recording etched on paper in 1860, seventeen years before Edison invented the phonograph. The device, called a phonautograph, captured the snippet of song by scratching marks onto a paper blackened by smoke. Its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was a typesetter who was interested in the written preservation of speech. The resulting document was never intended for playback.

Im guessing most of us see the future of robotics as one of two things: friendly domestic servants who help with our household chores, or menacing overlords who take over the planet and subject us to slavery. Did anyone have a cowering, neurotically-spinning humanoid machine on their list? No? You have apparently yet to be charmed by the Phobot, winner of the Human-Robot Interaction 2008 Student Design Competition in Amsterdam.

Youre on vacation. You have your digital camera and you plug it into your friends laptop to upload a few pics to your favorite photo sharing site. Youd love to make a few quick adjustments before you publish, but your friends computer has no good image editing software. Enter Adobe Photoshop Express online. Through their revamped Flash 9 player, Abobe has created a scaled-back and easy-to-use version of Photoshop which runs entirely in your Web browser. Best of all, its free.

Weve been talking a lot lately about bacterial resistance to drugs, most specifically as bacteria approach the limits of our treatments of last resort. As a consequence of the diminishing returns on traditional families of antibiotics, scientists have turned their focus to more novel approaches for combating infection. The work has been aimed at better understanding the interaction between our immune system and particular bacterial strains. Most recently, a team of researchers at the University of Washington have discovered just how the common staph infection resists our defenses.

Used to be, you had to connect your PC to the Internet first before it became bloated with viruses and spyware. Now all it may take is plugging in a brand new iPod or digital picture frame—recently, new peripheral devices have been arriving in stores with viruses pre-installed. The problem is most likely stemming from poor quality control in Chinese factories when devices are tested before packaging. As office IT personnel well know, all it takes is one infected machine to spoil the entire network.

Back to the Future II was a bit of a disappointment in the face of the original. Granted, it was hamstrung by the throw-away ending of the first, but it did have that brilliant opening sequence with the hoverboards. How much did you want a hoverboard after seeing that? Not to mention, the computerized, self-drying jacket Marty puts on to blend in. The stuff of fantasy, right? At least for the latter, not for much longer.

Steve Boggan has written an excellent article today in the Guardian on nanotechnology and its implications in the industrial food market. The first five paragraphs are as good a primer on nanotech as youre likely to find—send this one to your mom if she has any questions. The rest of the article is a closer look at its future in our food supply, particularly in light of consumers recent widespread distaste for genetically modified goods. The bottom line: the industry is outwardly hopeful about the technologys promise, but inwardly cautious about the public response. Oh, and we have no idea what itll do to us when we eat it.