Technology

Viper
Cost to Develop: $250,000Time: 2 yearsPrototype | | | | | Product
If were ever going to see a true era of commercial space travel—a day when Virgin Galactic is just another spaceline—Tim Bendel believes we need a better rocket engine. Specifically, something that is to the space industry what the internal combustion engine was to the nascent car industry a century ago: a standard, off-the-shelf option that can power any manner of vehicle, from tourist ship to lunar lander. And it has to be affordable to companies not owned by billionaire Richard Branson.

Sky Serpent
Cost to Develop: $250,000
Time: 9 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Today’s largest wind farms are the size of small towns, made up of turbines 30 stories tall with blades the size of 747 wings. Those behemoths produce a great deal of power, but manufacturing, transporting, and installing them is both expensive and difficult, and back orders are common as the industry grows by more than 40 percent a year. The solution, says inventor Doug Selsam, is to think smaller: Capture more power with less material by putting 2, 10, someday dozens of smaller rotors on the same shaft linked to the same generator.

InSeT System
Cost to Develop: $475,000
Time: 2 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
In January 2006, an explosion rocked West Virginias Sago coal mine, trapping 13 miners. Rescuers searched an area 500 feet wide by two miles long and didnt reach the miners until 41 hours after the blast, eventually pulling out 12 bodies and one survivor. Jim Ponceroff, who led a rescue team, says that the biggest challenge in recovering miners is locating them quickly so that engineers can drill a borehole for fresh air and, ultimately, rescue. Sago, like most of the countrys nearly 900 active mines, relied on radios that transmit signals over a thin wire thats easily damaged in a cave-in.

Bel-Air
Cost to Develop: $236,000
Time: 1 year
Prototype | | | | | Product
Your home could be emitting toxic gases. Just ask the victims of Hurricane Katrina, whose emergency trailers, made with glue-laden particleboard, let off so much formaldehyde that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that residents should spend time outdoors and make relocating to permanent housing a priority. Even in more expensive new homes, the concentration of emissions from things like furniture, carpet and paint can be two to five times as high as it is outdoors. But most air filters only catch particulates such as dust and pollen rather than organic compounds like formaldehyde and benzene, and the filters that do trap those gases need frequent replacement. So Mathieu LeHanneur and David Edwards built an ultra-efficient filtration system that eliminates toxins using natures own hazmat squad: plants.

Paragon Diving System
Cost to Develop: $1.2 million
Time: 7 years
Prototype | | | | | Product
Diesel oil and raw sewage slowly trickled into Taber MacCallums eyes as he swam toward the sunken research ship hed been called to help salvage. It was 1989, and Hurricane Hugo had devastated Puerto Rico three days before, dumping fuel and municipal waste into San Juan Harbor. As the young diver and analytical chemist worked to raise the ship, the seals on his diving equipment disintegrated in the muck that crept into his helmet. Every time MacCallum exhaled into the putrid water, his helmet let a few drops back in.

The Cyclone
Cost to Develop: $2 million
Time: 8 yearsPrototype | | | | | Product
As long as the internal combustion engine has been around, garage tinkerers have been trying—in vain—to best it. But Florida boat engineer Harry Schoell, a lifelong inventor with a portfolio of patents, thinks hes got the answer, in the form of a reinvented steam engine.

After much anticipation, Microsoft Research today released a new, free online tool designed to open up the world of astronomy to the masses. Microsoft describes the WorldWide Telescope as a "Web 2.0 Visualization Software Environment" - but don't worry, the tool is easier to use than it is to define.

Mercury's magnetic field is about 100 times weaker than that of the Earth - a curiosity that scientists have been trying to make sense of for years.

Recent observations of Mercury's rotation suggest that the planet has a partially molten core, and scientists at the University of Illinois and Case Western Reserve University developed laboratory experiments to model what might be happening beneath the surface.

Tired of car chases, robberies, and general action-packed anarchy? Set aside Grand Theft Auto IV for a minute and enter a new kind of gaming adventure: the exciting world of protein folding! Researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington have developed Foldit, a free, online game in which players compete to design proteins.

While most scotch whiskey terminology veers towards the religious, the so-called “water of life” has been subjected to more scientific scrutiny than one might expect. But it's still a work in progress. Earlier this week at the New York Academy of Sciences, Simon Brooking, Master Ambassador for Ardmore and Laphroaig distilleries, appeared in his traditional clan tartan to walk a crowd through the chemistry behind the whiskey.

A horse was euthanized this past weekend on the hallowed track of the Kentucky Derby. Eight Belles ran the race of her life, finishing second. But, just steps past the finish line the filly snapped both her ankles and crumbled to the dirt. Veterinarians on site promptly decided to euthanize the horse—on the racetrack—with just a few trucks and an appropriately placed oversized derby hat shielding the more than 150,000 spectators (NBC wisely did not show footage of the horse).

Atom bombs are just the beginning. In the last half-century, the greatest military minds on Earth have developed an arsenal of weapons to make mutually assured destruction seem tame.

Whether these masterpieces of destruction come from miles above Earth or millimeters below the skin, they have one thing in common: they're spooky as hell.

Duke University engineers think they've made an important step towards developing robotic surgeons that operate independently. The robot they used in their experiments—which were just feasibility studies, and were not performed on real people—uses 3-D ultrasound as its eyes, and an AI program that processes the 3-D information it gathers to determine the robot's next steps.