Popular Science

Just back from the Transportation Research Board conference and meetings, Carolyn Whelan, a New York-based freelancer focused on alternative energy, climate change, trade and travel, guest blogs for PopSci.com, focusing on new fossil-fuel emissions cutting technologies for infrastructure and transport which will (hopefully) play a prominent place in the Obama administration.

Like retailers did with the Internet (think Ebay and the Arpanet), transit officials are borrowing a host of space-age applications from the military, enabling real-time reaction, response, repair and rerouting in routine and emergency situations.

Or so said gadget and system developers at the Transportation Research Board’s annual shin-dig this week, where some 10,000 folks in the road, rail, air and boat transit world meet to talk riveting topics like pedestrian wait times at stop lights (green means go) and measuring traffic flow over snow.

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Adobe Flash has helped create many of the animations and games commonly found on websites. But Israeli director Ari Folman used the multimedia software to make Waltz With Bashir, an animated film which explores traumatic memories of his experience as a teenage soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War.

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The bright, pristine slopes are calling your name. You head up to the mountain at sunrise, strap on your skis, and hit the first run. Only, instead of the immaculate white snow you had been dreaming about, you find the snowpacks are not as bright white as they should be, and your run is accompanied by streams of melting snow following you down the side of the mountain. The culprit? Soot. This pollutant has been darkening and melting snow-covered mountains for awhile, but the first experiments to quantify how much soot contributes to snowpack melt were only carried out recently.

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About 130,000 people attended CES this year. Gaffers and booth babes, engineers and security guards, drivers and technicians by the thousands devoted months to staging the world's largest consumer electronics show. And by this time today likely nothing more remains in all of Vegas than a lone, abandoned flash drive and some tumbleweeds.

Forget the world's smallest violin, we're going the denial route.

Click here for a look at 26 of our picks and pans—from favorite sleeper debuts and sweetest celebrity shills to the most awful sales pitches and product ideas. Light up an electric cigarette, lean back in your $7,500 recliner and join us. It ain't over till we hit "z"!

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Silicon wafers, the backbone of the electronics industry, are brittle and fragile. So researchers have sought to create a more supple polymer surface that can be stretched, twisted, and bent in any direction and to populate it with newly engineered circuits. The solution: "pop-up" wire connections between the circuit components, along with flexible S-curves in the wires that can unwind and slip back into shape.

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“Stress relievers” that typically come to mind in reference to college life include partying hard, engaging in fraternity shenanigans, and ordering pizza. Add pet ownership to that list. A new study out of Ohio State University found that pets-- not beer-- are help college students to get through difficult times.

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The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration may be long past, but plenty of adventurers still share Sir Ernest Shackleton's dream of reaching the south pole. And last Wednesday three Canadians broke the world record for crossing the continent to the pole unaided, traveling 700 miles on snowshoes and skies from Hercules Inlet on the Ronne Ice Shelf to the pole in 33 days, 23 hours, and 30 minutes—beating the last record by nearly 6 days. In case you're wondering, yes, that is crazy fast. Considering the lack of even dogs to help pull the sled, it could also be considered just plain crazy.

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If your son was captain of the high school football team around 2,000 years ago, the mantle in your living room might look something like this: blue ribbon, gold medal, championship trophy, severed head from the opposing team on a string. Historians, archaeologists, scientists, and people with interesting hobbies have long known that the ancient South American culture responsible for the Nazca Lines in the highlands of Peru collected human heads as trophies.

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High on the back wall of the New Jersey Poison Center in Newark, beyond a display case filled with bottles of ant killer, antifreeze and other ingredients of noteworthy cases, hangs an electronic map of the state. It displays dozens of glowing red dots. Each marks the origin of a call received over the previous 24 hours. Updates sweep down the map every 10 minutes, and the staff knows where to expect clusters based on population. “This is one way that computerization can help us pick up unexpected hotspots,” says medical director Steven Marcus.

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Almost one year ago to the day, at a CES where energy-efficient gadgets were touted strictly for how eco-friendly they were and not for their budget-consciousness, three of the industry's giants announced a joint e-waste recycling venture. In tough times it is not only the extras that go but the things that are deemed not strictly necessary in that we did not have them before and we managed more or less. E-waste recycling could have become one of those things, indeed still might, but at least at this year's show it looks like the foothold it gained in years past is solid.

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