When mosquitoes brought West Nile virus to New York, all the papers said it was going to be the next big deadly epidemic (which, of course, it wasn’t). The day the news came out, I was in my garden in Pittsburgh, and a mosquito landed on my arm. I smacked it, then immediately thought, “Oh my god! West Nile virus!” So I ran inside and did something I hadn’t done since grade-school summer camp: I doused myself with insect repellant. Then I got a whiff of the fumes and remembered I just read an article saying insecticides cause Parkinson’s disease!

Even if you had free run of any skybox in Madison Square Garden, you still wouldn’t see half the action that you will in your own living room, one day soon, on a large-screen holographic television. Without ever leaving your chair, you’ll be poised to watch each play unfold from whatever perspective you choose, gazing into the depths of your TV.

The next time you close your eyes and imagine your house of the future, picture a bunch of soda bottles. That´s essentially what Philadelphia architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake have been working with in their quest to identify materials, technologies and mass-manufacturing techniques that they expect will reinvent their profession.

As Ansari X Prize champs Burt Rutan and Paul Allen and their band of multimillionaire brothers—Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson and hotelier Robert Bigelow—close in on developing the launch vehicles and orbital habitats that will open space travel to the well-heeled tourist, one big question remains: What are you going to do up there?

Steve Austin had that enviable telescopic squint. Star Trek chief engineer Geordi La Forge saw darkness as daylight with his 24th-century ocular implants. And now it looks like a generation of very real people who have lost their sight are next in line for such seemingly sci-fi vision. “I’m hesitant to use the word ’superpower,’ ” says Armand R. Tanguay, Jr., an electrical-engineering professor at the University of Southern California who is building the world’s first implantable camera for the blind.

There are plenty of great ideas for the future out there. Predicting which ones will become more than ideas, which technologies will come storming into your life and flip it upside down—that’s dangerous business. But it sure is a rush. And it’s exactly what we’ve done in the pages that follow: We homed in on the most jaw-dropping research projects happening in five core realms and extrapolated just how—and when—they’ll come to exist.

The papers Einstein wrote in 1905 covered a broad swath—special relativity, electrodynamics, Brownian motion, light quanta. Churned out in less than a year, these ideas had lasting impact: scientists today still devote their lives to evaluating Einstein´s work on gravity, space and time. Einstein isn´t the only scientist, however, to pull off such compacted productivity. Newton, Galileo and others had their own superproductive 12-month stretches—but as far as we can tell, no post-Einstein scientist has managed one. Why? Read on.
Galileo Galilei: 1609-1610

Kansas State University flight instructor Brad Amstutz jumped at the chance to simulate Steve Fossett's round-the-world GlobalFlyer flight. The challenge presented by Popular Science: Take off at the same time as Fossett, fly the mission as if it were his own, and see if a simulated flight challenges him in the same ways the real flight challenges Fossett. His only rule is that if Fossett has to terminate his flight, Amstutz will also land.

You are dangling like bait at the end of a 22-foot-long robotic arm, and it looks and feels exactly like you're zooming through space. It's tempting to gaze at distant planets, except that an asteroid as big as a house is hurtling toward you. Just before impact, you blast it with a phaser cannon while executing a series of buttery barrel rolls to avoid the debris. The asteroid bits pelt your ship, rattling you to the marrow. Then, without warning, you're sucked through the blackness of a wormholeback into reality.

CASIO
EXILIM Zoom EX-Z750
MSRP: $449
Resolution [effective]: 7.2 megapixels
Video file type: MPEG-4
Zoom lens type: 3x optical/ 8x digital zoom lens, f2.8-5.1 [38-114mm 35mm equivalent]
Lighting: AF Assist lamp
LCD size: 2.5"
Frame rate and window size: 30 fps at 640x480
Dimensions: 3.5" x 2.3" x .88"
Weight: 4.48 ounces [w/o battery]
Memory Type: SD Card

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