As his convoy rode toward Balad, iraq, on a 116-degree day last July, U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robbie Doughty sat facing out the side of a Humvee, gun in hand, scanning the roadside to head off an ambush. Then: boom, and smoke everywhere. When Doughty looked down, blood was gushing, most of his right leg was gone, and his left leg had taken a dogleg at the shin.

While most of us science-literate folks are watching the biotech revolution with tentative optimism, hoping for innovations like medicines that have no side effects because they’re tuned to a patient’s genes, or livers and kidneys grown to order for people with organ failure, some intrepid souls are taking much larger leaps. Based on the fledgling promise of stem cells and brain-machine interfaces, they wonder: Why tolerate chronic pain, or suffer irrevocable injury in accidents? Why become forgetful, get sick, or grow old?

A Toxic Glow
In July, researchers at Emory University made tumors in rats glow by injecting the rodents with quantum dots, submicroscopic semiconductors that shine when light is beamed at them. The next step: making the dots glow in the infrared spectrum—those wavelengths are easier to see through body tissues than are visible light waves.

In Wichita Falls, Texas, inside a hangar surrounded by weeds and rusting aircraft scrap, 59-year-old entrepreneur Jay Carter, Jr., is chasing a milestone that he says will one day be as well known in the aviation community as the speed of sound: Mu=1. Beyond it, Carter says, lies an aerodynamical promised land in which aircraft take off like helicopters and then travel forward as quickly and efficiently as airplanes.

Barnaby Wainfan has seen the future of general aviation, and it looks like a stealth fighter. His design for an inexpensive home-built two-seat general aviation airplane, the Facetmobile, is a delta-shaped blended-wing aircraft composed entirely of sharply angled flat planes—just like the Lockheed-Martin F-117, which was unveiled to the public six months after Wainfan began building his design.

Slideshow:


Replacing your home office stereo
Living out of a suitcase
Toting to poker night

Smart Smile
“Smile map” software introduced by Stony Brook University researchers in March detects
patterns of muscle movement when a person smiles, and uses the data to identify the person later on. Developers expect it to outperform conventional face-recognition programs, which calculate the
distances between major features.


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In February, MIT student Saul Griffith introduced a

Imagine your own personal fighter jet, a sleek speed demon with the hindquarters of an F-18, the nose of a T-38, and your name stenciled on the side. Would you pay a $2.5-million price tag—assuming you could?

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01.13_PANDEMIC PANIC A flu virus that originated in birds kills three people in Vietnam, raising fears that the potent strain may spread unchecked if it becomes capable of human-to-human transmission.


01.26_MAD-COW IN THE CHOW? After a cow in Washington State tests positive for bovine spongiform encephalo- pathy at the end of 2003, agricultural officials strengthen an existing ban against including cow parts in cattle feed. Bovine tissue is known to harbor disease-causing prions.