Rena Marie Pacella

Making a dent in the climate crisis is going to take more than solar panels and recycled toilet paper. Scientists are finding ever more creative ways (pig pee! DIY tornadoes! mini nuclear reactors!) to clean up the Earth

Twenty years ago, duck hunter Stan Hewitt built his first amphibious vehicle, a clunky 10-wheeled truck-boat hybrid that topped out at 10 mph on land and just 7 mph on water. Hewitt wanted to tackle the prime duck habitat of the Alaskan tundra, an area hard to access using regular vehicles, and needed to improve the craft’s speed and maneuverability to handle the currents there.

The Kanzius RF Field Generator
Cost to Develop: $1 million+Time: 5 yearsPrototype | | | | | Product

When a man with no medical degree and a diagnosis of fatal leukemia builds a cancer-curing machine in his garage, you might think it merely the desperate attempt of a dying man to escape his fate. And youd be right. The weird thing is, it just might work.

K3 Promoter
Cost to Develop: $100,000
Time: 8 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Gordon Link, a diabetic and foot amputee, is not looking to climb Mount Everest, run a marathon, or snowboard off a cliff. I just want to walk without stumbling like Im a drunk, he says. It may not sound like a tall order, but until he was fitted with a prototype prosthetic foot that simulates the bodys natural movements, walking on uneven ground was like navigating an obstacle course. Hitting a low spot of even one inch with my old foot was like a non-amputee stepping into a four-inch hole, he adds. Not good.

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If the biotech industry has its way, ordering a hamburger might soon sound something like this: one charbroiled cloned-beef patty, with genetically modified cheese, lab-grown bacon and vitamin-C-fortified lettuce, on a protein-spiked bun. The burger of the future is delicious, nutritious and contains more engineering than a stealth bomber.

Hovering above the floor in a darkened room called the CAVE (for cave automated virtual environment) is the larger-than-life-size virtual patient CAVEman, the worlds most sophisticated digital model of the human body. To create it, scientists at the University of Calgary and graphic artists used anatomy texts and specimens to render every organ, bone, nerve and biological system into detailed 3-D images.