february 2009

Even from his house six and a half miles away, Gary Arold’s son can clearly hear the artillery-grade boom from his father’s giant air cannon. Along with his friend and co-builder, John Gill, Arold’s favorite pastime is sending pumpkins—and other roughly spherical projectiles, including a bowling ball and a 12-pound frozen turkey—flying nearly 4,000 feet across Gill’s Hurley, New York, farm.

Prone to wipeouts? Even if you end up face-down in a drift trying to tackle a double black diamond, this adventure-ready gear will still be there to preserve the moment when you rebound for another run (or when you hand it to your friends and head back to the lodge).

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Over the past 20 years, Richard Pyle figures he’s discovered 100 new species of fish. But he’s identified only one fifth of them. Pyle, an ichthyologist at Bishop Museum in Hawaii, isn’t a slacker—he spent hundreds of hours tracking down those fish. It’s just that proving that a new species is unique can be as tough as finding it in the first place.

In this episode of Cocktail Party Science, host Chuck Cage sits down with features editor Nicole Dyer and Eric Hagerman, author of "Wingman" to learn more about just what kind of lunatic straps jet engines to his back and leaps out of an airplane. Learn more about how Yves Rossy's homemade jet-fueled wingsuit works, why there's nothing crazy about his mission. Plus: hey! What about a bird strike?

Download the episode here, or subscribe to the iTunes feed.

Google's index reached a trillion pages last year, but that doesn't mean it (or other large search engines, like Yahoo) will always understand the exact intent of your search and yield results that have the information you really want.

When you're driving a 4.7-ton truck filled with scientific equipment across a crevasse-strewn Antarctic wasteland, choosing the right path is critical. Deep cracks in the ice, invisible from a distance, can swallow a truck whole. An Antarctic expedition needs an ultra-light scout vehicle to run ahead and find a safe route before the heavy machinery rolls through. That's exactly what the Concept Ice Vehicle (CIV) is built to do.

When you're driving a 4.7-ton truck filled with scientific equipment across a crevasse-strewn Antarctic wasteland, choosing the right path is critical. Deep cracks in the ice, invisible from a distance, can swallow a truck whole. An Antarctic expedition needs an ultra-light scout vehicle to run ahead and find a safe route before the heavy machinery rolls through. That's exactly what the Concept Ice Vehicle (CIV) is built to do.

Create a business card that automatically places a Skype call when waved near a computer, or a photo that opens an online video of your vacation. A new kit makes it easy to devise your own uses for radio-frequency ID tags, something that previously only programmers could do.

It’s late and you just want to get those last 100 miles of interstate behind you, drowsiness be damned. Bad idea. Recognizing that too many fatigued road-trippers end up in accidents, Mercedes-Benz developed software, dubbed Attention Assist, that monitors behavior and urges sleepy drivers to get some rest. The system will debut on two of the company’s 2010 luxury sedans, the redesigned midsize E-Class [concept design above] and its flagship S-Class.

It’s late and you just want to get those last 100 miles of interstate behind you, drowsiness be damned. Bad idea. Recognizing that too many fatigued road-trippers end up in accidents, Mercedes-Benz developed software, dubbed Attention Assist, that monitors behavior and urges sleepy drivers to get some rest. The system will debut on two of the company’s 2010 luxury sedans, the redesigned midsize E-Class [concept design above] and its flagship S-Class.

It’s true: The brain of NASA’s primary vehicle has the computational power of an IBM 5150, that ’80s icon that goes for $20 at yard sales. According to NASA and IBM, the shuttle’s General Purpose Computer (GPC)—which controls, among other things, the entire launch sequence—is an upgrade of the 500-kilobyte computer the shuttle flew with until 1991.

The waning black crescent is all that remains from an Escherichia coli sample. "If it could scream, it would," says University of Iowa microbiologist John Kirby, who led a recent study on bacteria behavior. The E. coli has fallen victim to Myxococcus xanthus, a type of bacteria that forms unique rippling waves as it feasts on other bacteria. During an attack, M. xanthus secretes enzymes to break down E. coli, and then each bacterium moves back and forth like a vacuum cleaner to suck up its food.

The waning black crescent is all that remains from an Escherichia coli sample. "If it could scream, it would," says University of Iowa microbiologist John Kirby, who led a recent study on bacteria behavior. The E. coli has fallen victim to Myxococcus xanthus, a type of bacteria that forms unique rippling waves as it feasts on other bacteria. During an attack, M. xanthus secretes enzymes to break down E. coli, and then each bacterium moves back and forth like a vacuum cleaner to suck up its food.

Chances are you've got a more advanced recording studio in your laptop than the Beatles had when they made Sgt. Pepper's, so record your music yourself. Then build an Internet home that can grow with your entourage. Skip the cookie-cutter MySpace stuff and get a full-fledged content-management system like WordPress or Drupal, which will allow you to build your empire as you go: a blog, forums, photos, videos -- all in one place that you control. And make sure it can support a digital music store so you can sell your own MP3s.

Chances are you've got a more advanced recording studio in your laptop than the Beatles had when they made Sgt. Pepper's, so record your music yourself. Then build an Internet home that can grow with your entourage. Skip the cookie-cutter MySpace stuff and get a full-fledged content-management system like WordPress or Drupal, which will allow you to build your empire as you go: a blog, forums, photos, videos -- all in one place that you control. And make sure it can support a digital music store so you can sell your own MP3s.