Technology

To some men, bicycles may look like the key to good health and a prosperous sex life—riding around all day keeps you fit and attractive; you can save that $4.50 a gallon of gas money for your date/girlfriend/boyfriend/house party; and you get to wear really, really tight clothes. But there’s a downside. Cycling can also cause genital numbness, erection problems and skin irritations in the groin area, a new report in the urology journal BJU International confirms, citing several medical studies over the last few years.

These detailed views of the red planet were transmitted to Earth by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). After a 72-million-mile trek through space, the craft reached Mars in March 2006, delivering some of the most advanced technology ever sent to another world.

Stroll by a strip mall arcade or the local Dave & Buster's, look behind the noisy kids playing Dance Dance Revolution, and you'll likely spot an air hockey table. Like Pac-Man and the maddening claw game, air hockey remains unchanged and everlasting. Two facts seem to endear us to the floating puck: 1) everyone thinks they're good at the game but 2) nobody knows for sure. Nowhere in the sports landscape are so many goals scored upon oneself. A 6-0 victory in one game is reversed in the next battle, thanks entirely to Lady Luck. But when you compete against the Air Hockey Bot 1000 (AHB-1000), a career once dictated by fickle fortune can finally be tested against formulaic consistency.

Sorry, vinyl aficionados, but CDs most accurately capture the clarity of musical performances. If you look at the grooves of a standard long-play record, or LP, through a microscope, you’ll see that each is filled with what look like rolling hills. These are, in fact, an extremely close replication of the shape of the sound waves from the musician’s instrument. But because the needle that carves the groove is shaped slightly different than the needle that reads it, the LP will never sound exactly like the original performance.

Vladimir Putin has worn many hats, from KGB officer to judo master to Bond-villain like autocrat. Well, add a new persona to the list: environmentalist. Today Putin announced that he will be moving the site of the 2014 winter Olympics because of concerns construction for the event would cause ecological damage in the ski resort town of Sochi.

A 450 square foot shoebox apartment was once a valid exemption from owning fitness equipment (and merely one component of your preemptive exercise avoidance plan). But you soon may have one less excuse for that gut.  The Otto-Bench, a concept created by Gabriel Prero, presents the first chink in your oversized armor. The aesthetically pleasing ottoman or coffee table, transforms seamlessly into a weight bench and houses all the required hardware needed to get buff.

Chuck Cage sits down with editor Nicole Dyer and writer Cliff Kuang to get the inside scoop on the future of the environment. In this episode of Cocktail Party Science, the three tear open the eco-friendly green megalopolis to learn more about the pod cars, maglevs, energy-generating sidewalks and more.

Now that the glitches caused by the Martian soil's clumpy consistency have been shaken out, the Phoenix Lander has been able to cook up a few samples to test the soil composition. The preliminary results are surprising even to the chemists at work on the project: the soil is alkaline, and much more so than anyone expected. The analysis has found trace amounts of magnesium, sodium, potassium, and other elements similar to those in the soil on Earth. On first pass, Martian dirt appears to be non-toxic and laden with the basic nutrients necessary to support life.

Along with satellites and space stations, Earth is surrounded by tens of millions of pieces of floating space debris. Like any landfill, the trash is diverse, ranging from dead satellites to castaway rocket parts to flecks of paint. On average, over the past 40 years, one piece of space junk has fallen to Earth every day.

At this moment, in the constellation Taurus, a planet is forming in the dust and debris surrounding the star HL Tau. The protoplanet, named HL Tau b, may be the youngest yet discovered.

Bill Gates is taking over the Olympics. The supposedly retired CEO of Microsoft has taken his antitrust antics to new heights with the launch of NBC Olympics on the Go. Using a dedicated video player provided by TVTonic, users can specify their viewing preferences and events will download automatically when they're available. Commuters taking public transit can even watch saved video without an internet connection.

A couple of days ago, it was big news when ice was found on Mars. Now, an upcoming study in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta claims that the Martian environment was once wet enough to produce morning dew. This finding runs counter to the more widely accepted view that liquid water on Mars seeped up from the ground, rather than falling from the sky as precipitation.

Hollywood, in its infinite desire to generate easy profits, has decided to do yet another remake of the Jules Verne classic Journey to the Center of the Earth -- this time in 3-D!. As we can see from the trailer, this movie is going to be a special effects extravaganza. Now, while we all know that the entire idea of traveling to the center of the Earth is pure fantasy, and any "science" represented in the movie is not to be taken seriously, we have so much scientific information about the state of the Earth's interior -- much more than Jules Verne ever could know -- that somehow the premise just falls flat.

Skin guns. Organ printers. Pig dust. Biochemist Alan Russell believes tools like these could one day be standard-issue for the battlefield medic. The skin gun would heal burns. The organ printer would replace badly wounded livers, kidneys, even hearts. And the pig dust?