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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.

Common wisdom in this age of door-to-door combat dictates that the U.S. submarine fleet is of diminishing utility–after all, there are no terrorists hiding underwater. But common wisdom does not so easily apply to the USS Jimmy Carter, a giant Seawolf-class nuclear submarine modified into a spy ship. The submarine, commissioned in February, will serve as a stealthy weapon near enemy shores: tapping into undersea fiber-optic cables, covertly delivering Navy Seals into enemy ports, and, if necessary, directly attacking enemy ships and land-based targets.

The Federation of American Scientists has created two tools to estimate the destructive impact of a nuclear “bunker buster” bomb. The blast-effects calculator illustrates the immediate destruction that occurs in the moments following a detonation. Specify bomb yield and location, and the calculator produces a blast diagram superimposed over a satellite image of the selected city. Use the fallout calculator to trace the four-day radiation pattern that results from the initial blast.