Oceanographer Robert Ballard is returning to the Titanic, but it’s not the same sunken ship he found in 1985. The deep ocean has been steadily dismantling the once-great cruise liner, and scientists say the process is unlike any they’ve ever seen. “Even if we could stop it, I wouldn’t,”says forensic archaeologist Charles Pellegrino.

Yes, that’s the word—“Hair”—written delightfully, absurdly, on a human hair. This whimsical 3-D microsculpture comes from the head of John Fourkas, a chemist at Boston College. The letters look as imposing as the “Hollywood” sign under an electron microscope, but they’re only 10 microns tall—about 1/10 the width of the hair. Fourkas carefully sculpted each letter from thousands of tiny baked “bricks” of Plexiglas, some as small as 120 nanometers in width.

The military garb designed by mechanical engineer Homayoon Kazerooni at the University of California, Berkeley, is anything but standard issue. Kazerooni’s 90-pound battlesuit, dubbed BLEEX for Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton, consists of a pair of robotic legs and backpack-like frame. Wearing the prototype, a soldier can haul up to 75 extra pounds with little effort. BLEEX is still a far cry from the superhuman combat gear envisioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is funding the research.

As any 9-year-old with a Lego set can tell you, it’s easy to build things for destruction. The challenge for grown-ups designing crash-test dummies is to create something highly technical that can recover from one collision to be used in the next. “We don’t break bones,” says Steve Moss, technical director of First Technology Safety Systems, which is

Hi-MD

For Example
Filling your Hi-MDs takes a few scant moments with Sony’s MZ-NH1, sitting pretty in its combination USB 2.0 cradle and battery charger.

Vitals
Takes 1GB Hi-MD discs; 3.25 x 3 x 0.59 inches; in-cord remote. $400; sony.com

Inside the Tech
Record
A red laser creates nonreflective bumps on a flat, reflective data track on the memory layer. It creates bumps smaller than it can read.

You love your digital camera, but can you find a fresh SD card in Kathmandu? Your GSM â€world phone†is great, but do you know it won´t work in Korea? And why bother locking your luggage if the security folks at LAX are likely to clip it anyway? The answers to such wandering quandaries lie, of course, in technology. From stitchless surf trunks to truly interactive digital guidebooks, we´ve wrangled six innovations to help you squeeze the most out of your summer vacation.

Dept.: Gray Matter
Element: Magnetite
Project: Collecting, purifying magnetite; making magnetic field lines
Cost: Free
Time: 30 minutes
Dabbler | | | | | Master

Making Steel with Beach Sand

Thermite powder yields pure, white-hot iron when lit. Don't try this one at home.



Uncovering a Natural (Magnetic) Attraction

A long walk on the right beach could reveal
magnetite hiding in plain sight.



Melting the Unmeltable

YOUR GEAR

With the RIAA gone lawsuit-happy and Kazaa trading as many viruses as songs,
legal online music stores are probably worth another look. Our new addiction: the Russia-based AllofMP3.com, which uses a weak ruble to pass the savings on to you.

onClick="window.open('','popup1','height=250,width=790,scrollbars=yes,resize=no')" target="popup1" class="sidebar">Click here to view InfoGrid: Online Music Stores