When you rip songs from CDs into MP3 files, some audio quality is inevitably lost during compression. Creative's X-Fi is an audio-processing chip that identifies the specific sound patterns that are typically damaged
in music-file conversion. Then it enhances them, restoring audiophile quality to the digital file without adding to its size.

You're sitting in your Tokyo hotel room on a business trip and the only English channel on TV is CNN. But you don't care, because you've got a direct line back to your living room. You open your laptop, and suddenly you're flipping through your TV channels and seeing live American TV just as though you were on your couch. You can even access your TiVo and all its recordings. When you get back home, you can tune in ESPN on the laptop while you're grilling in the backyard.

Constructed of a wood-based polymer that can be injection-molded like plastic, the RKS maintains the tone and long-lasting sound of wood. The material also allows for the ax´s unprecedented â€neck-through†open design, which accommodates the series of resonating aluminum ribs that add layers to the sound. The result is a guitar with the bite of a solid-body electric and the fullness of a hollow-body. From $2,000

Last year an analysis of every gene in your body would have taken more than six months and cost roughly $25 million. The new desktop Genome Sequencer 20 System from 454 Life
Sciences can do it in less than a month for about $300,000. The breakthrough is a fiber-optic chip about the size of a business card that is embedded with 1.6 million wells, each a quarter the size of a human hair. The chip holds hundreds of thousands of DNA fragments.

The LifeStraw, from Danish company Vestergaard Frandsen, may be the best hope yet for the 1.1
billion people worldwide who lack access to safe drinking water. The 3.4-ounce â€straw†can filter up to 185 gallons of water, enough to supply one person for a year. Just dip the plastic tube into water
and suck on it to draw liquid up through three filters. Two textile layers remove dirt, iodine-based resin kills 99.3 percent of bacteria and viruses, and activated carbon catches whatever the iodine missed.

Let Scooba loose, and it will not only vacuum but also squirt, scrub, squeegee, and suck your floor drya first for household robots. By condensing the device's components, iRobot kept the bot to the size of a 3.5-inch-high dinner plate. $400

Spray Grancrete over a frame of
Styrofoam, metal, wood-even woven sugarcane stalks-and in 20 minutes you have a waterproof, fire-resistant structure that has more than twice the strength of traditional concrete and can withstand extreme temperatures without cracking. A liquefied concrete-like mixture of sand, ash, magnesium oxide and potassium phosphate, Grancrete descends from a product developed to encase radioactive waste.

In July, theoretical physicist Amos Ori of Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, proposed a provocative new model for a time machine. Unlike previous designs, Ori's version doesn't require exotic wormholes-theoretical tunnels from one point and time in the universe to another. Instead it involves a force, either man-made or natural, to warp a region of spacetime so drastically that lines of time form closed loops. Pilot a spaceship around this course, and you'll circle back to the past.

MIT bioengineer Alexander Klibanov is devising a nasty weapon to ward off microbes: a bed of nanoscopic nails. Affixed to computer keyboards, countertops and fabrics, the nails would puncture germs the way road spikes pierce tires, providing permanent protection against bacteria, Klibanov says.