Gadgets

It's the circle of life, I'd always figured: You buy a carpet, you stain a carpet, you use bottle cleaners to smear a carpet, you replace a carpet. Thus, I didn't give Dirt Devil's Spot Scrubber ($50) a second look when it came out last year. But over the past few months, it's removed wine, coffee, and tomato sauce from my carpet like magic. What's the secret? I asked Dirt Devil's Rob Matousek.

The annual Young Inventors Awards program challenges kids to design and build gadgets that solve real, everyday problems. Not only does the contest spur creativity, says Brian Short of the National Science Teachers Association, it also teaches a valuable lesson in problem solving: "Any complex tool can be broken down into several simple tools." Here are three semifinalists from this year's competition, along with comments from the inventors.

An Oklahoman's invention could dramatically lower the cost of air-conditioning. Like any air conditioner, the Kelix transfers heat from inside to outside by raising and lowering the pressure of a liquid refrigerant -- but without the power-hungry compressor that is mostly to blame for air-conditioning's notoriously high energy consumption.

What happens when six unskilled white-collar workers try to frame a three-bedroom house?




Recently, Carlton, Minnesota, landscape architect David Chmielewski and his wife, Jennifer, grabbed four helpers and gave it a try. In less than two days, armed only with hammers, they finished what Chmielewski calls "the squarest, straightest house I've ever been in."

Maybe you first tune in the station driving past some lobster-roll shack just outside Bangor, Maine. You know the music isn't coming from the local FM radio tower a few miles away. Instead, it's being digitally compressed and uplinked from a massive command center in Washington, D.C., bouncing off a pair of Boeing satellites in geostationary orbit high above the equator, and finding its way to a sleek little shark-fin antenna mounted on the trunk. The technology is at best a compelling afterthought, because after the fourth or fifth song, you realize the music speaks to you.

The music industry is taking the first small, yet irrevocable, step toward changing how you listen to and share digital music. After years of teeth-gnashing and spitting in the wind, all the major record labels have finally gotten serious about their digital music initiatives, namely by entering into agreements to sell the best stuff from their top artists, including new releases, on the Internet. In fact, the services may be up and running by early fall.

Strolling down the streets of Ybor City, a popular tourist area in Tampa, a well-dressed couple stops by an open doorway to watch a master cigar maker roll one the old-fashioned way. What they don't know is that someone is watching them too: the Tampa police. They've done nothing wrong, but a police officer sitting a few blocks away snaps close-up pictures of their faces anyway, using one of several dozen remote-control cameras mounted on poles overhead. The officer's computer then compares their faces with a database of wanted criminals to see if there's a match.

Remember the Erector Set, those interlocking nuts, bolts, and metal strips that kids used to build things with? Well, the Nobel-prize-winning chemist Sir Harry Kroto does. "One of the disasters of modern life," he recently told startled listeners on BBC radio, is that it has been "displaced by Lego."

You can almost feel the bipolar sense of anticipation and dread building: Microsoft is about to release a major new version of Windows, the operating system software that makes most of our computers run -- or halt, depending on the operating system's whim. We'll be getting lots of new housekeeping functions in Windows XP, some "enhanced reliability," and probably an improved Internet browser, depending on the U.S. Justice Department's capriciousness.

I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm not a photographer. I don't even particularly like taking pictures. But as an editor covering digital cameras, I've dutifully learned about the new image sensor technologies as they've arrived, noted the debut of more and more film-camera-type features, and monitored the narrowing gap in quality between the digital and film-based worlds. All the while secretly thanking God that all you really had to know about buying a digital camera was its resolutionhow many pixels on its sensor.

Strolling New York City's famed Fifth Avenue and nearby garment district, we crossed the portals of a new type of store, into a brand new world. The new retailers were computer stores, which we recognized as the herald of an oncoming revolution.

My passenger in the Ford Taurus I'm driving suggests we skip through Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street." It's not my favorite song either. I start to fiddle with the CD player in the instrument panel. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see that I'm running off the road into a ditch at 60 mph.

It used to be the stuff of comic books: jet-powered surfboards, personalflying devices, boots that leap tall buildings in a single bound. Now technology is turning those fantasies into reality. Just visible on the horizon -- Is it a bird? A plane? -- are some exciting high-tech travel toys that will move you into the future, fast.