Hand tools for turning nuts and extracting nails can be a man’s best friend—or foe. These innovative new grippers are designed to deliver unparalleled leverage and versatility, making it easier than ever to squeeze into tight spots to dislodge a rusted nut or extract a headless nail.

Learning to fly a helicopter takes hundreds of hours, and even then few pilots feel safe maneuvering one over enemy terrain or forest fires. Yet missions such as these are precisely what choppers are good for, where on-the-fly surveillance may mean the difference between life and death. It doesn´t take a genius to appreciate the potential benefits of a miniature copter, mounted with a remote-control camera, that flies itself.To build one, though, takes real ingenuity, as choppers are not inherently aerodynamic.

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The next time someone asks who´s on the line, you can say it´s Bono, because 2005 is shaping up to be the year of the music phone. Previously, phones that played music had limited storage, and queuing up a song was cumbersome. But as carriers roll out MP3-friendly high-speed cellphone networks, phone manufacturers have been inspired to boost memory and design phones with dedicated play buttons, built-in speakers, FM transmitters and graphic equalizers. In other words, they´re functional MP3 players.

We´re most prone to power outages in the summer, when everyone cranks their air conditioner and power demands skyrocket. When the power goes out, it´s likely to be hot and uncomfortable, and staying in touch becomes difficult as battery life drains from your gadgets.

It takes lots of light to deliver bright, crisp images on your rear-projection TV, but that same light leaks through to the screen during dark, Perfect Storm—style gloomy scenes, hindering detail. To darken the blacks, a growing number of LCD and DLP rear-projection-TV manufacturers are turning to mechanical apertures that can limit the amount of light that reaches the screen. HP, Toshiba and Sony, among others, are using a dynamic iris, which automatically narrows like a camera’s aperture to reduce the amount of stray light.

Pricey plasmas aside, most types of big-screen TVs and projectors are lit by an incandescent bulb or fluorescent lamp, which lasts anywhere from 1,500 to 8,000 hours and isn´t pure enough to reproduce the full spectrum of colors available in HDTV. By the time your bulb burns out, though, you might have better options: TVs illuminated by LEDs and lasers can last 10,000 to 15,000 hours and create a wider color gamut. Engineers are working on boosting LED light into a beam bright enough to illuminate ever-larger flat screens.

In the evolution of ride-over-anything mountain bikes, the ever-vulnerable rear derailleur—that gangly parallelogram that shifts the chain up and down the rear cogs when it´s not clogged with mud or bent by rocks—has been a glaring technical handicap. So GT (gtbicycles.com) got rid of it. With its $5,000 IT-1, GT moves gear-changing duties to an unsullied haven inside the bike frame, by way of an eight-speed internal transmission.

An earthquake is a sudden release of stress that has built up along a fault line, where rock faces push against each other. If that stress could be released over a longer period of time—with a series of smaller quakes—the result might be less catastrophic.

Engineers have known for 40 years that injecting fluids deep into wells can accidentally trigger mini—quakes by lubricating “sticky” rock faces. Since that time, there have been numerous proposals to pump fluids into stressed fault lines.