Martian Chess is played on an ordinary chessboard using a standard set of chess pieces, a standard deck of 52 playing cards, and a six-sided die. The pieces are set up in the usual fashion, and each player is dealt 13 cards. White goes first.

"Think about your eyeball," urges Peter Hall. It, your brain, and your retina "allow you to build an image in an instant using parallel processing. That's what a Luneberg lens could do for astronomy."

"I'm now convinced that Mars
is inhabited by a race of demented landscape gardeners," Sir Arthur C. Clarke announced recently.




The author of 2001: A Space Odyssey was only half-joking. He claims that an image produced by the Mars Global Surveyor satellite shows "large areas of vegetation . . . like banyan trees." Most experts dismiss the idea. But Popular Science loves a free thinker, especially one as talented and charming as Sir Arthur. We questioned him in Sri Lanka via e-mail.

Popular Science What makes you so confident there is life on Mars?

Timeline, September 1926

Day One: Orientation

It's 7 a.m. in Houston, and I'm watching a video of a grown man getting sucked into a jet engine.

Driving home from work, you suddenly remember that a few of the T-ball kids are supposed to come over after the game. Should you pick up a couple of pizzas on your way? You pull out your cellular phone and call home to check.

When I first saw Whirlpool's Personal Valet a few months ago in North Carolina, I didn't have time for a formal test. But I did have a wrinkled shirt with me (more accurately, on me). I loaded it into the device, waited a half-hour, and -- voilà -- my shirt came out pressed and clean-smelling.

Sometimes, the simplest ideas are the best. Exhibit A: the Venta Airwasher,
a combo air purifier-humidifier that's now available in the United States after a successful debut in Germany.

It's the circle of life, I'd always figured: You buy a carpet, you stain a carpet, you use bottle cleaners to smear a carpet, you replace a carpet. Thus, I didn't give Dirt Devil's Spot Scrubber ($50) a second look when it came out last year. But over the past few months, it's removed wine, coffee, and tomato sauce from my carpet like magic. What's the secret? I asked Dirt Devil's Rob Matousek.

The annual Young Inventors Awards program challenges kids to design and build gadgets that solve real, everyday problems. Not only does the contest spur creativity, says Brian Short of the National Science Teachers Association, it also teaches a valuable lesson in problem solving: "Any complex tool can be broken down into several simple tools." Here are three semifinalists from this year's competition, along with comments from the inventors.