Since we inaugurated Guess This Tool, you've all proven way too hard to stump, so for this week's contest, we're mixing it up a bit and giving you a mystery part rather than a tool.

This Week in the Future: November 8-13, 2009:  Baarbian.com

We're all about the future here at PopSci; we put the pieces together and deliver the news and nuggets you need to know to stay on top of where this world (and universe, and beyond) is headed. This week, the future's looking like quite the wild party--water from space, libidinous rats, and transforming UAVs. What's not to love?

(Get the details, and win the t-shirt, after the jump).

“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s.

Cats may retain an aura of mystery about their smug selves, but that could change with scientists using a supercomputer to simulate the the feline brain. That translates into 144 terabytes of working memory for the digital kitty mind.

In The People's Republic of China, it's no secret that the Party controls just about everything. But as Beijing suffers through its second major snowstorm this season, residents are growing weary of their leadership's control-freak tendencies. After all, while the storm came as a surprise to residents, the government knew about it all along. In fact, the government caused it.

Over the weekend President Obama and other world leaders broke the news: No legally binding international climate-change treaty this year.

Worst-case planning never hurt anybody, and certainly not federal water projects that cost millions of dollars and could be easily undone by climate change and rising sea levels. A new policy now requires the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to plan for future climate change when designing plans for flood control or other projects.

This Week in the Future, November 16-20, 2009:  Baarbarian

UV phasers, battlefield-based cryogenic tech, computerized cat brains and space fish on Jupiter's moon? Believe it, baby. The future is yours, and we've rounded it up for you in high style once again with This Week in The Future

There aren't too many YouTube videos capable of inducing measurable feelings of vertigo while you watch comfortable at your desk, but this is one of them. It was filmed by a brave, brave Scotsman standing on top of the world.

Algae get a lot of airtime as a possible future source of biofuels to wean us from dirty fossil fuels, but even biofuels don't go so far as to eliminate hydrocarbons (and their constituent carbon emissions) from our energy diet. But a different use for algae could prove a better solution to the future of fuel.

A new process that produces clean, sustainable hydrogen from photosynthesis in algae could change all that. The means of manufacturing clean, usable hydrogen has heretofore required a high-energy process that drastically dilutes the upside.