While working on "Yesterday, They Would Have Died" (October 2003), Michael Rosenwald's inside look at a high-tech emergency room, Popular Science staff photographer John B. Carnett logged numerous hours in the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland, compiling a huge collection of stunning and sometimes shocking photographs. The following photo gallery features a few of the best.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 5 years, you're aware that digital music has given its listeners unprecedented freedom to manage and move their music. It's also been running roughshod over the music industry (which still hasn't completely stopped blaming digital music for declining CD sales). However, their participation in some of the new digital music ventures gives us hope they're getting hip to the notion that their industry will survive not despite, but because of these advances. Here's a summary of how things looked five minutes ago.

In "Get Out Now!" [Oct. '03], Stephan Wilkinson tells the history of fighter-plane ejection seats starting from the early 1940s, but high-altitude escape technology actually reaches back at least five centuries. Professional skydivers Katarina Ollikainen and Adrian Nicholas recently teamed up with an art historian to construct in painstaking detail a parachute designed by Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci.

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The following videos of morphing wings from FlexSys Inc. are formatted in streaming Real Video. In order to view these clips you must have RealOne player installed on your computer. Click here to download a free player.



Video (1) of morphing wings



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Feature story: The Shape of Wings to Come

Finally, a scanner that keeps pace with the urban emergency room: The Statscan is a digital X-ray device that can produce a full-body image in 13 seconds. Compare that to conventional X-ray films, which take up to 45 minutes to develop and must be pieced together to make head-to-toe images.

Ah, science!

Somewhere out there is a kid in a red BMW 325 with a ski
rack who thinks he spanked my well-modified '83 Porsche 911 the other day. He came up on my rear bumper on Route 9W looking for a fight, blew past at 65 mph, and wailed away at what I guess to be about 90 mph. He's probably wondering why a poseur has a roll bar and speed-equipment stickers on his rear quarter window yet drives like he votes in St. Petersburg.



As I watched him disappear in the distance, I thought to myself, Have a nice day, 2Fast 2Stupid, I'm going to the track tomorrow.

Galileo, the interplanetary spacecraft that has changed the way we understand Jupiter and its 61 known moons, will perish on the 21st of this month as it plunges into the Jovian atmosphere. NASA engineers have put Galileo on a collision course with the planet so that the spacecraft, which is running low on propellant, can study the Jovian magnetosphere as a final task. The suicide mission will also ensure the craft won't end up crashing intoand possibly contaminatingthe ocean of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons.

It's 8:30 a.m., late rush hour, and Jim Murphy has a multibillion-dollar set of new tunnels beneath downtown Boston at his fingertips. So far things have been quiet, but should traffic get gnarly, as it so often does in this city of six-hour gridlocks, his console will automatically display the problem areas. Then he'll have some options: Zoom in on the jam through closed-circuit cameras; direct traffic with variable message boards; and, if things take a turn for the worse, override local radio frequencies.