may 2009

November 1970: "Enter the Meditator and surround yourself with the graphics which cover its walls . . . you may find the sensation akin to that mystical communion with nature that you experience when alone in a forest — or the sense of peace you feel in an empty cathedral."

Browse the archives at popsci.com/archives.

No need to don a hard hat just yet. The odds that one of the millions of pieces of trash orbiting Earth will fall and hit you are about one in a trillion, says Bill Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies.

The risk that someone will get hit can run far higher, though, says Nicholas Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris. NASA and other space agencies aim to keep the risk of injury from falling objects lower than one in 10,000. The risks typically run higher with large objects. For example, there's a one-in-1,000 shot that the Hubble Space Telescope could hit someone if it falls from orbit once it's decommissioned, so NASA will preemptively steer it into the ocean.

Every year, 800,000 Americans elect to have a tiny metal-mesh tube inserted into their coronary artery to prop it open and improve blood flow to cardiac muscle tissue. It's an easy choice — the alternative entails cracking open the chest and operating on a stopped heart. The tube, or stent, is permanent, but the vessel hardens over it within months. After that, it becomes a nuisance. The metal blocks x-rays and MRI scans, and it can catch blood cells and form a dangerous clot. Now medical-equipment manufacturer Abbot Laboratories has developed a stent that opens the artery and then simply disintegrates.

Summer is coming, and that means robots, teleportation, antimatter bombs, dinosaurs, an elite high-tech fighting force, fictional metals with unearthly properties ... we love it!

Here’s a look at the Hollywoodified science hitting the big screen this summer, complete with our highly scientific Expected Gibberish Quotient (EGQ).

Car accidents kill 115 people a day in the U.S. and cost an annual $230 billion. Cautious drivers can avoid only so much danger, especially when it's a car running a red light, or a truck that pops out of a blind spot. But commuting could get safer with new in-car technology that warns you of that vehicle just around the corner — and even hits the brakes for you.

"Absolutely." That's what Barack Obama told Barbara Walters last November when asked if he would make the White House more environmentally friendly. Of course, he wouldn't be the first.

Commercial Flight: 2020

The long, skinny tube has to go. Tasked with improving the nation's air transportation, NASA wants airplanes to burn 40 percent less fuel than a 777 by 2020 and 70 percent less by 2030. Not only that, it wants those same planes to be whisper-quiet. The best -- and perhaps the only -- way to reach these ambitious benchmarks is to design commercial planes more like stealth bombers and less like pencils.

Doctors have miniaturized almost everything they need to send robots inside your brain's blood vessels to treat damaged tissue. But making a motor small enough to squeeze past blood cells has held things up. Now, engineers at Monash University in Australia have built a micromotor that brings bitty 'bots closer to reality.

In this photo (See it bigger!) Bristol Elumotion Robotic Torso 1, or BERTI, takes time to play rock-paper-scissors at London's Science Museum in February, while on a three-day vacation from the lab. A collaboration between Elumotion Ltd., a British robotics firm, and Bristol Robotics Laboratory, BERTI was built to help researchers study how robots could communicate using motion.