popular science

The annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference covers arguably the greatest variety of subjects of any science conference in the world. This year's gathering, held in St. Louis, Missouri, hosted symposia on everything from astrobiology to veterinary ethics. And although it's impossible for one reporter to cover more than a small fraction of the 200-plus scientific sessions held over five days, here are a few highlights of the most exciting research happening now.

This January, news that South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk fabricated research on cloned human stem cells brought more negative attention to an already controversial field. Hwang´s work had been believed to be a breakthrough. His technique for cloning embryonic stem cells genetically matched to patients might have been used by scientists worldwide to cure disease.

This is not a Blimp. It's a sort of flying Queen Mary 2 that could change the way you think about air travel. It's the Aeroscraft, and when it's completed, it will ferry pampered passengers across continents and oceans as they stroll leisurely about the one-acre cabin or relax in their well-appointed staterooms.

Talk about a dream job. A handful of lucky engineers just outside Paris earn their euros creating wild concept cars for Peugeot, and their only imperative is to advance the state of automotive design. While dreaming up their latest project, they hit upon a radical way to skim weight: ditch the vehicle's rear end. Specifically, they eliminated one of the wheels and all the accompanying components, including suspension, brakes, and the actual body around it. The result, dubbed the 20Cup ("two-oh cup"), is a 1,279-pound three-wheeler that carries just 20 percent of its weight in the rear.

Know of a really gross science job? Email us and tell us about it and we'll consider it for future coverage in Popular Science ! Please include "Worst Jobs in Science" as your subject line.

HDTV sets are stunning—until you pop in a movie and are reminded that DVDs are not recorded in high definition. At 480 lines of resolution, they don’t even begin to take advantage of a 720- or 1,080-line display. That will change later this year when Toshiba introduces the first high-def disc player for the U.S. market. Toshiba’s breakthrough box, an HD DVD player that at press time was still unnamed, will cost about $1,000 (toshiba.com).

When Mercedes-Benz began to contemplate its next generation of high-efficiency small cars, it sought aquatic inspiration. But instead of considering obvious undersea hot rods like sharks, the Mercedes team turned to a fish that resembled a car: the tropical boxfish. A native of the Indo-Pacific region, the Ostracion cubicus is surprisingly slick. Wind-tunnel testing of a clay model revealed a drag coefficient (Cd) of just 0.06, startlingly close to the ideal 0.04 of a water droplet.

American motorcycles have a reputation for being low-tech machines stripped down for speed. But there´s only so much a bike can do without. So Confederate Motor Company (confederate.com) replaced every metal piece possible with a lightweight carbon-fiber one. The company hired industrial design firm Foraxis to help fabricate the new parts and produced a bike that weighs a mere 375 pounds: the B91 Wraith.

First there were big screens. Then big flat screens. Now there are big flat screens packed with tricks, like the ability to record TV or access your home network. It’s all part of the push to minimize the number of decor-busting black boxes while maximizing entertainment choices—movies, slideshows, your music collection. Here are five reasons to chuck your TV in favor of a multitalented model.

1. The Laptop Impersonator
This 2.7-inch-thin flat screen takes its cue from the computer world, with two PC-card slots to handle its latest features.

In the evolution of ride-over-anything mountain bikes, the ever-vulnerable rear derailleur—that gangly parallelogram that shifts the chain up and down the rear cogs when it´s not clogged with mud or bent by rocks—has been a glaring technical handicap. So GT (gtbicycles.com) got rid of it. With its $5,000 IT-1, GT moves gear-changing duties to an unsullied haven inside the bike frame, by way of an eight-speed internal transmission.

Since the dawn of wireless, the roving Google junkie has faced two options: a bulky wireless laptop or a Web-page-cropping PDA. This fall, however, Nokia (nokia.com) will introduce a palm-size Internet gadget that surfs Web pages in full, albeit scaled-down, glory, anywhere. Measuring three by six inches, the 770 connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi or a Bluetooth cellphone. Think of it as a $350 replacement for that second PC.

Pint-size cars are the practical option in European cities, whose streets seem to be designed for wheelbarrows, but they come up short on safety. Keenly aware of this dilemma, Milan-based automotive designer Pininfarina has reconsidered subcompact safety from the inside out with its Nido concept car. Named after the Italian word for â€nest,†Nido refers to the unique design for protecting passengers of this diminutive two-seater (it´s 2.5 feet shorter than a Mini Cooper).

A few months ago I got a voicemail from my seven-year-old nephew informing me that he needed help building a satellite communication device. He had most of the necessary parts, he assured me, including aluminum foil, some wires and cables, and AA batteries. All we needed to get started was a radio or remote control.

Nothing came of our project, but the imaginative reach of his idea made me wonder: Where did this itch for invention come from? Was my sister sprinkling something in his cereal? Reading him Arthur C. Clarke at bedtime?

It's a slow-motion horror movie: Nuclear waste leaks from underground storage shafts and seeps toward a river, where it contaminates drinking water used by millions of people. That's exactly the scenario unfolding at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in rural Washington State.The solution, too, sounds like a page ripped from a Hollywood screenplay: Insert two industrial-strength electrodes deep into the ground, and melt the soil-along with everything around it-into solid glass, trapping the toxic waste for thousands of years. The U.S.

There were acrobats from the Cirque du Soleil, a mechanical objet d'art that looked like a mad inventor's spaceship, and a voluble computer-generated wizard that bore a disturbing resemblance to a bathrobe-clad George Carlin-the ceremony in Toulouse, France, that marked the completion of Airbus's first A380 was nothing if not pomp-filled. But when four kids finally tugged on a huge tasseled cord and the curtain fell to reveal the largest jetliner ever built, the spectacle was just beginning.