august 2008

The roar of the engines is deafening. Directly in front of me, I’ve got the No. 1 car, more than 3,000 pounds of hot steel, locked in my sights. I’m right on my rival driver’s rear bumper, a supermodel-thin distance between us as my 760-horsepower Chevy bears down at 184 mph. As we go into the last turn, No. 1 offers the tiniest of openings to the inside. I go low for the pass, giving my ride everything it’s got left to pull ahead in the final straightaway . . .

Ah, that sinking feeling: You’ve just left for a business trip when you realize you’ve forgotten the PowerPoint presentation on your PC at home. No matter: With the right tools in hand, you’ll be able to retrieve your file regardless of where you are.

If you’re a sports fan, you can probably list the top pitchers, the top quarterbacks . . . and the top orthopedic surgeons. A franchise’s success—and an athlete’s next contract—hinges on how quickly injured superstars return to the field. Here’s how doctors are turning what would have been career-ending injuries a decade ago into speed bumps on the way to Canton or Cooperstown

That’s not a carnivorous blob escaped from a B-movie—it’s a musical instrument called the Slime-O-Tron II. When Brooklyn engineer Eric Singer isn’t building elegant, music-playing robots, he designs unconventional audio controllers that send digital signals, known as MIDI data, to music software, turning them into sounds. For his latest such invention (he built the original Slime-O-Tron last year), Singer cooked up some slime from a recipe he found online and infused it with graphite to make it conductive.

Will drinking carbonated beverages weaken my bones?

Maybe—but only if you're drinking several gallons of seltzer a day. Here's the chemistry that has soda drinkers worried: As carbon dioxide hits the water in your blood, it turns into carbonic acid. Too much acid in the blood can lead to a condition called acidosis, which could intercept small amounts of calcium from food as it makes its way to your bones, or steal it from them directly. Your greater concern, though, says endocrinologist Robert Heaney of Creighton University, should be the vomiting, headaches and impaired organ function that result from extreme acidosis.

So it looks like it's not all gloom and doom after all. A few recent studies have managed to find the slim silver lining of climate change. Below, a look at the three small positive outcomes of global warming.

The pole vault is all about energy conversion. The kinetic energy built up during the vaulter’s run turns into potential energy stored in the pole as the vaulter bends it nearly 90 degrees. When the pole recoils, it unleashes that energy to help propel the vaulter up and over the bar. Of these stages, Peter McGinnis, a professor of kinesiology at the State University of New York at Cortland, has found that the most important is the speed of the vaulter just before he plants his pole. The energy built up during the run accounts for almost 60 percent of the vault’s height.

lying dormant for more than 9,000 years, the Chaitén volcano belched forth a 40,000-foot-tall ash plume in early May, touching off lightning and a monthlong eruption. The volcano, situated 700 miles south of Santiago, Chile, forced the evacuation of 8,000 people from the nearby village of Chaitén. It was roughly comparable in size to the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption that released hundreds of millions of tons of debris in an explosion 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

Before the discovery in the 1920s of quantum mechanics—laws that explain the way the world works on the very small scale of atoms and electrons—the fact that bleach and peroxide glow when mixed would have seemed like just another chemical reaction that gives off light, like fire or fireflies. But it’s actually a glimpse into the impossible.

It’s not necessarily laziness that makes people hit the “snooze” button in the morning. Most likely, your body clock is mismatched with the demands of your life.

Your clock is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a part of the brain that controls the body’s biological rhythms. But, says Jean Matheson, a sleep-disorders specialist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, these preset natural rhythms often don’t align with daily realities—work or school start times cannot be adjusted to fit a person’s sleep schedule.

At the starting dock of the Olympic triathlon trials, the expression on Andy Potts’s face seems to say I will kill you with my eyes. As the starting gun fires, he plunges into the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and, in a burst of white foam, quickly pulls ahead of nine rivals. The second-ranked Hunter Kemper manages to hold pace with Potts for a few minutes, then drifts back into third place.

To power up a mountain, you need a stiff bike frame that transfers pedaling force straight to the wheels. But zooming downhill without jolts or spills calls for more cushioning. So Kona’s Coilair bikes feature a lever that automatically shortens the shock when you pedal and lengthens it when you coast. The lever also pushes the seat closer to the ground, lowering the center of gravity to match the stability of a dedicated downhill racing bike.

Nautical engineers have long dreamed of a craft that could race across wave tops like a speedboat and seconds later dive beneath them like a submarine. But crossing the two breeds presents a catch-22: Subs need heft to sink, but speedboats need to be lightweight to go fast. With an investment of nearly $2 million and years of research, former auto-shop owner Reynolds Marion of Lake City, Florida, has finally hit on a solution, a machine he’s dubbed the Hyper-Submersible Powerboat. When complete, it will reach speeds of up to 45 mph and dive down to 1,200 feet.

Swimming around in their tank, these autonomous robotic jellyfish move alone or in a swarm and communicate with their brethren to avoid underwater collisions. Developed by German industrial-automation company Festo as an attention-grabbing experiment in cooperative robotics, each AquaJelly uses eight bendable “tentacles” to propel itself forward.

Playing the harp isn’t the most high-tech pastime—unless, like Stephen Hobley, you use lasers in place of the strings. Though not the first home-built laser harp, Hobley’s creation is unquestionably the coolest. Played by disrupting the laser beams with his hands, it can produce just about any sound. Better yet, it’s also a fully functioning controller for a version of Guitar Hero.