The evolution of life on Earth over the past four billion years may be the most lavish, and successful, R&D program in history. The human being, capable of making tools and solving crossword puzzles, is one remarkable product, but so too is the squid, which mastered jet propulsion millions of years before NASA, and the bacterium—the original inventor, three billion years ago, of the free-spinning wheel. Natural selection has exploited almost every physical and chemical phenomenon, including electricity, which is used by both sharks and the duckbill platypus to sense potential prey.

A: Sure, just get yourself a V-8 Hemi and some hot glue . . . Seriously, the most obvious way to squeeze more speed from your electric scooter is to replace its motor with one that’s more powerful. You’ll need to find a bigger DC (not AC) motor that is rated for the same voltage as your battery pack, or use one that’s rated at a higher voltage and simply install more batteries.

Powerful explosions take place near James Walker’s office in San Antonio, Texas, every day. At two adjacent shooting ranges, testers fire guns, and in a third facility built to simulate massive impacts, they smash materials into targets at more than 25,000 miles an hour.

A week after finishing her dissertation on the formation of the moon, Robin Canup danced the lead in Coppelia with the Boulder Ballet. “At the time, it felt like I had a wonderfully full and busy life,” she says, “but I can’t believe now I did it all.” Canup, 35, stopped dancing professionally five years ago. “By that age you’re an old dancer but a young scientist,” she says. Still, there’s an unexpected harmony to her career: Now she studies how moons glide around planets in space.

For the third straight year, we have pounded on the doors of academe, scrutinized professional journals, and scoured the rosters of awards-granting organizations to select 10 scientists to watch—people who are gaining recognition from their peers yet remain virtually unknown to the public.

“See this?” says Henrik Jensen. He clicks a mouse button, and an onscreen marble bust starts to rotate. The spinning torso has a subtle, almost intangible glow. Thanks to complex computer algorithms Jensen devised, it appears uncannily real.

Brian Enquist talks about the natural world as if it were a wind-up clock. “If you take it apart, it’s very complex,” he says, “but there are some very simple principles that make it work.” And like a master Swiss watchmaker, he is looking for a set of universal laws that describe the
rhythms of plant and animal life.

When Claire Gmachl worked at Bell Labs, she had a parlor trick that never failed to delight visitors. She would place a lens a few inches from a laser and clamp a matchstick six inches in front of the lens. Then she’d use the lens to focus the laser’s invisible infrared beam onto the matchtip, and voil! She could light a match without touching it. You might think a scientist would be glad to have an entertaining way to show off the power of her devices. But to tell the truth, Gmachl found the exercise a bit “dorky.” She has little patience for distractions.

Summer temperatures rarely rise above 0 degrees Celsius in Antarctica. There are no trees or flowers, no cars or cable TV—just perpetual daylight, a hunk of ice the size of the continental U.S., and glaciers as big as cities, moving hundreds of meters a year. Deep within those glaciers, under millions of pounds of pressure, the history of the atmosphere lies buried.

“I don’t actually like the cold,” admits Kurt Cuffey.

When we make a new memory, where is it stored in our brains? The question consumed Karel Svoboda for years. Others had approached the problem in two ways: They used noninvasive technologies such as MRI and PET scans to watch the living brain in action; for a closer look, they dissected brain tissue under the microscope.