September 2009

From the ultimate desk chair to the pen that saves a digital copy of everything it writes, this is the fresh-from-the-lab tech could change how students cram.

Harry Kloor may be the world’s most well-rounded nerd. He is the only person to have earned doctorates in physics and chemistry simultaneously, and he has penned episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. And when NASA asked him for help in improving its image with young people, he drew on both of those experiences. The best way to get kids enthused about outer space, Kloor figured, was to hide their medicine in a bucket of popcorn. Next February, Quantum Quest, a star-studded CGI space adventure that pairs animated protons with real footage from NASA spacecraft, hits theaters. “Many of NASA’s scientists were inspired by Star Trek and Star Wars,” he says. “I want to inspire that kind of passion.” We caught up with Kloor to find out why kids will go nuts for quarks.

You’re in luck. For their senior project, two Cornell University computer-engineering whizzes recently built a machine that does just that. After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical.

Red-Eye Flight Relief

If you drag after a transcontinental flight, imagine yourself after a trip to Mars. To aid frequent flyers and future Marstronauts, researchers at the University of Michigan and Harvard Medical School wrote software that models complex internal timing systems like our circadian clock. Based on variables such as light and number of time zones crossed, the software will determine how much and how often to expose travelers to full-spectrum light to reset their brain. Future versions will factor in caffeine and naps, which could help astronauts deal with day-night cycles on the moon or Mars.