• The Environment

    Message In A Bottle

    By Paul Adams Posted on 1.23.2009 12 Comments

    Given the choice, you probably wouldn't risk sailing 11,500 miles from San Francisco to Sydney in a boat handmade of 20,000 plastic water bottles. But David de Rothschild, the founder of the nonprofit educational organization Adventure Ecology, sees such a vessel as the perfect way to "beat waste" by promoting new uses for recycled plastic while dramatizing the problem of ocean debris. Next month, de Rothschild and a crew of scientists will sail the Plastiki, a 60-foot catamaran, to environmental hotspots including Bikini Atoll, the former atomic-bomb testing site, and Tuvalu, an island rapidly disappearing under rising seas.

  • Ground Bot

    By sway Posted on 10.27.2008 Comments

    The GroundBot is a spherical sentry designed to roll up to 6 mph through just about anything—mud, sand, snow and even water. Two gyroscopically steadied wide-angle cameras and a suite of sensors give remote operators a real-time, 360-degree view of the landscape, letting them zoom in on prowlers or detect gas leaks, radioactivity and biohazards. Originally invented by Swedish physicists to explore other planets, the GroundBot features a tough design that requires almost no maintenance and can also be programmed to run autonomously.

  • Science

    Toilet Tech

    By Paul Adams Posted on 3.12.2009 17 Comments

    Remember the last time you had one hand Twittering away on your Blackberry and the other hand locating the nearest Prius dealership on your iPhone's GPS, all the while talking to Best Buy on your Jawbone bluetooth earpiece about your 42-inch HD plasma TV? That was a moment to truly appreciate the staggering speed of technology's march towards progress. Now imagine you were doing all that while sitting on the toilet. Whoosh, one flush just ended technology's march forward. Why? Because, despite the amalgam of technological advancements in phones, televisions, transportation, and the Internet, the one item we use everyday, multiple times a day - the ubiquitous toilet - has remained in the technological dark ages for centuries here in the U.S.

  • Gadgets

    A House That Walks

    By Paul Adams Posted on 11.6.2008 19 Comments

    Houses are normally fairly stationary objects, and that's not considered a bad thing. But innovation never stands still, and a new prototype house that can walk on six legs has been built . The house is ten feet high, powered by solar panels, and is outfitted with a kitchen, toilet, bed, and wood stove. Last week, the house, a collaboration between MIT and the Danish design collective N55, took a journey through Cambridgeshire in England as part of an art project at the Wysing Art Center. Designed to move at the muscle speed of a human, the house walked at about five kilometers an hour around the 11-acre campus. (See video)

  • The Environment

    Making the Most of **it

    By Abby Seiff Posted on 1.19.2009 19 Comments

    In José Saramago’s novel Blindness, when an epidemic of sightlessness sweeps the city, among the foulest signs of civic breakdown is its inability to handle its own excrement. Human waste piles where it lands, left to the elements and not modern plumbing. To newly minted industrial designer Virginia Gardiner, we might as well be blind to our own waste. Her plumbing-free toilet project, the Gardiner CH4, makes us personally responsible for our intimate product—and makes it useful.

  • Cars

    Eco Driver's Ed: the 2010 Honda Insight

    By Paul Adams Posted on 2.10.2009 12 Comments

    Aggressive driving -- lead-footed acceleration, speeding, excessive braking -- can slash highway mileage by 33 percent, according to government estimates. Honda's Insight hybrid, arriving in April, softens the effects of wasteful driving and tells you when you're indulging in bad habits.

  • Cars

    The Push for Solar Energy in New York Gets a Boost at a Bar

    By taylorhengen Posted on 2.26.2009 1 Comments

    This past Tuesday night, Solar One, a green energy arts and education center in New York, hosted their second “Party for a Solar Powered New York” at Southpaw bar in Brooklyn.


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February 2012: The Future of Fun

Science is reinventing play, from extreme sports to gamification to ridiculous roller coasters to the playgrounds of tomorrow, and this issue is chock full of fun. Also, on a less fun note: Did global warming destroy my hometown?


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