MIT researchers have proposed a strange new way to predict the severity of a hurricane: Listening underwater. Currently, the most common way to gauge a storm's strength is to either study satellite images (which can be pretty inaccurate), or fly a weather plane straight on into the storm and gather critical data (which gets expensive).

Your kid borrows the car, blasts too many techno tracks, and blows out the subwoofer. It used to be that you´d have two choices: Buy a new one (woofer, not kid) or put up with a hoarse bass line. But when a subwoofer pops, it´s usually only the voice coil-the part that drives the cone-that´s burned out; the rest of the assembly is just fine. Boston Acoustics´s SPG555 subwoofer is the first with a replaceable voice coil that you can install yourself.