Slideshow:
1. Electrolux Trilobite
2. Sharper Image eVac
3. Friendly Robotics Friendly Vac RV400
4. iRobot Roomba Discovery
5. Karcher RC3000 RoboCleaner

A light shines under the closed door of a radiology suite, down a darkened hallway deep inside the University Medical Center in Bern, Switzerland. Outside the building, under the glow of a fluorescent street lamp, an empty hearse waits in the loading dock. Tonight the local undertaker is earning some extra money making a special delivery. Entering the radiology room through a back door, he gently deposits a body—double-wrapped inside a blue bag—on the sliding bed of a full-body scanner.

Slideshow:
1. The Floating House
2. The Body Scanner
3. The Spy Ball

Click here for a closer look

Personal security isn’t a concern merely for crazies grooming the sod over their backyard fallout shelters. In Orange Alert America, nasty images of what might happen are relevant, universal worries. So Popular Science challenged the Core77 online industrial-design community (core77.com) to imagine the future of personal security. What kinds of devices could protect us and our worldly possessions? We received 120 entries; in the end, these three concepts stood out because they address real fears in a practical way.

Tech: Game Boy Advance SP
Base Cost: $100
Total Cost: $164
Steal | | | | | Splurge

On March 29, 2003, the High Energy Transient Explorer (HETE) satellite detected an unusually bright gamma ray burst a mere 2 billion light years away (hey, that’s very close for a GRB). The event yielded new insight into a topic shrouded in mysetery and dominated by theoretical models since the 60s. The afterglow of this explosion gave scientists convincing evidence that hypernovas—the Collapsar model, so named by Dr. Stan Woosley because the implosion of a massive star’s core into a black hole triggers the event—are responsible for at least some GRBs.

Next spring, General Electric will inaugurate the Arklow Bank Offshore Wind Park, a wind farm just off the eastern coast of Ireland. The plant is already operating at nearly full capacity, its seven massive 3.6-megawatt turbines cranking out enough electricity for 16,000 households. Arklow Bank is Ireland´s first offshore wind-energy project and Europe’s 19th, with at least 10 more slated to go up in 2005.

Dept.: DIY
Tech: Recycled laptops
Time: 4 hours
Cost: $75-$410
Dabbler | | | | | Master

Archos AV420 Pocket Video Recorder
Barrier to Entry: Auto-recording is a pain.
The Luddite Likes: Movies on the train, long battery life.
Verdict: Wait for next gen.
Cost: $550
archos.com