A Drifting Fish Farm $750,000 (estimated)
Kampachi Farms, a mariculture company in Hawaii, is devising a way to
meet our insatiable desire for sushi with a farming method that has near
zero environmental impact. By filling 100-ft. (30 m) copper-alloy mesh
cages with fingerlings and letting them drift, tracked by GPS, in
deepwater ocean, the company hopes to harvest thousands of tons of
sustainable sashimi-grade kampachi. In 2011 it tested 20-ft. (6 m) pens 3
to 75 miles (5 to 120 km) off Hawaii. After six months, they yielded
10,000 lb. (4,500 kg) of kampachi, which grew twice as fast as expected.
Bahar Towers $245 million
In Abu Dhabi, where temperatures peak at well over 100°F (38°C), keeping
buildings cool is a challenge. Al Bahar Towers feature a facade with
intricately designed shades that open and close in response to the sun,
reducing heat gain by more than 50%. Using less air-conditioning helps
reduce the towers’ carbon emissions by an estimated 1,750 tons per year.
Baxter $22,000
Conventional industrial robots are scary behemoths, but Baxter is a new
breed. The latest brainchild of celebrity roboticist Rodney Brooks, who
helped invent the Roomba, Baxter is built for light repetitive tasks
like packing and sorting. And it’s cheap enough and user-friendly
enough—look at that face—for small outfits that otherwise couldn’t
afford a robot worker.
Body Armor for Women $555
Women are not small men. Finally realizing this, the U.S. military is
testing body armor designed expressly for a woman’s body. Current
designs are too loose and too long, leaving gaps that might make some
women more vulnerable to bullets and shrapnel. Even a men’s extra-small
is too big for 85% of female troops. The 101st Airborne Division’s 1st
Brigade will test the new armor during an upcoming deployment to
Afghanistan.
The original version of the article has been updated to reflect
the fact that the current designs of the armor provide protection for
men and women against gunfire fragments; the new version provides a
better fit.
Bounce Imaging $500 (estimated)
An MIT student and an Army Ranger have come up with a way to provide
first responders with the kind of technology elite SEAL teams have. To
give firefighters and cops a full picture of a burning building or a
hostage situation, the baseball-size orb is tossed into the area. Its
six cameras snap pictures while its sensors detect air quality,
temperature, radiation and other hazards. It then beams the data to
mobile devices.
The Civilization Starter Kit Free
Marcin Jakubowski built a tractor in six days. Then he told the world
how to do it: he made the designs, the budget and an instructional video
available free online. A farmer and technologist and the founder of
Open Source Ecology, Jakubowski has identified the 50 most important
machines required for modern life—from the soil pulverizer to the
oven—and is working to make a prototype of a low-cost DIY version of
each so that anyone anywhere can build them. “If we can lower the
barriers to farming, building and manufacturing,” he says, “then we can
unleash massive amounts of human potential.”
The Curiosity Rover $2.5 billion
NASA had visited Mars but never like this. Curiosity, which landed in
Gale Crater in August, is a 1-ton, SUV-size Mars car with more
scientific instrumentation—10 times as much, by weight—than ever sent to
the Red Planet before. But it was how it got there that really made the
machine sublimely cool: the rover was lowered to the ground on cables
by a hovering capsule, touching down balletically in preparation for two
years of exploration.
The Deepsea Challenger Submarine $8 million
Better known as the submarine designed by filmmaker James Cameron, the
12ton, 24-ft.-long (7.3 m) Deepsea Challenger reached the oceans’
deepest point—about 7 miles (11 km) below the surface—in the western
Pacific in March. Built to withstand 1,000 atmospheres of pressure (or
three SUVs sitting on your toe), the sub is equipped with digital 3-D
cameras and structured with a vertical axis meant to accelerate its
descent.
Eliodomestico Solar Water Distiller $50
Freelance designer Gabriele Diamanti created this solar-powered
distiller for use in coastal areas in the third world that are deprived
of freshwater. It is half as expensive and 67% more efficient than
existing models, and his hope is that local manufacturers will adopt the
open-source design and mass-produce it for local populations.
OraQuick Home HIV Test $40
With just a swab of saliva and 20 minutes, OraQuick can identify the
antibodies that signal HIV infection. It’s the first DIY test for
HIV—the same one that health professionals use but without the trip to a
doctor’s office or the need to wait days for results. The kit includes a
24-hour help line and resources for dealing with a positive result.
Enable Talk Gloves $75
Four Ukrainian students have created gloves that allow speech- and
hearing-impaired people to communicate with those who don’t use or
understand sign language. The gloves are equipped with sensors that
recognize sign language and translate it into text on a smart phone,
which then converts the text to spoken words.
Google Glass $1,500
Glass is, simply put, a computer built into the frame of a pair of
glasses, and it’s the device that will make augmented reality part of
our daily lives. With the half-inch (1.3 cm) display, which comes into
focus when you look up and to the right, users will be able to take and
share photos, video-chat, check appointments and access maps and the
Web. Consumers should be able to buy Google Glass by 2014.
Indoor Clouds Not for sale, maybe?
That’s not Photoshop. The Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde has developed a
way to create a small, perfect white cloud in the middle of a room. It
requires meticulous planning: the temperature, humidity and lighting all
have to be just so. Once everything is ready, Smilde summons the cloud
out of the air using a fog machine. It lasts only moments, but the
effect is dramatic and strangely moving. It evokes both the surrealism
of Magritte and the classical beauty of the old masters while reminding
us of the ephemerality of art and nature.
LiquiGlide 25¢ per bottle (estimated)
Five MIT students and their professor Kripa Varanasi have come up with a
way to make a surface that anything will slide off—from ketchup out of
bottles to ice off airplane wings. The plant-based product,
LiquiGlide, adds a
microscopic slippery coating to almost any material—glass, ceramic,
metal or plastic.
The MakerBot Replicator 2 $2,199
Download or create a design, hit Print, and watch as this sleek,
desktop-size 3-D printer extrudes ultra-thin plastic layers, each
melting into the one below to create an object—or, if you want, hundreds
of copies of it. The latest model from Brooklyn-based MakerBot prints
bigger, faster and more precisely than its predecessor. And with
more-intuitive software and no assembly required, the upgraded
Replicator means that anyone’s home can become a mini factory.
NASA’s Z-1 Space Suit Classified
The biggest thing NASA’s first space suits had to do—aside from keep
astronauts alive—was to look spacey. So ordinary test-pilot suits were
simply redesigned in a nifty silver. Things are harder now as the U.S.
prepares for new deep-space missions. The Z-1 space suit provides
go-anywhere garb featuring more-flexible joints, radiation protection
for long stays in space and a hatch on the back that allows the suit to
dock with a portal on a spacecraft or rover so an astronaut can crawl
through without letting dust in or air out.
Nike Flyknit Racer $150
By knitting thread into a single layer to fit around your foot—instead
of cutting and sewing together multiple materials—engineers at Nike not
only made this sneaker lighter (just 5.6 oz., or 160 g) but also gave it
a precision fit: the weave alternately grips and gives despite the
absence of liners or reinforcements. Plus, it’s eco-friendly, with less
waste left on the factory floor.
The Motion-Activated Screwdriver $40
The sensors found in smart phones and Nintendo Wii controllers have
migrated into Black & Decker’s cordless 4v MAX Gyro, billed as the
world’s first motion-activated screwdriver. Tilt it right by a mere
quarter of an inch and it screws clockwise to tighten; left, and it
turns counterclockwise—all thanks to an internal gyroscope that senses
wrist motions, which are measured by a small microprocessor that turns
those movements into changes in the drill’s speed and direction.
Self-inflating tires $200 each (estimated)
As soon as the pressure in these Goodyear tires (which don’t have an
official retail price yet) gets too low, they know it. An internal
pressure regulator opens to allow air to flow into a pumping tube, and
as the wheel turns, the flattened part helps squeeze air from the tube
through an inlet valve into the tire. Once the air pressure hits an
optimal level, the regulator closes—all without the driver’s realizing
anything was wrong.
Sony RX100 Digital Camera $649.99
Digital cameras have been getting smaller and more capable every year,
but that trend took a huge leap forward in 2012 with the
Sony RX100,
which bridges the gap between point-and-shoots and pro-quality digital
SLRs. Sony’s innovative design and 1-in. (2.5 cm) sensor allow the
camera to take flawless photos even though it’s 20% slimmer than your
average digital SLR—small enough to fit in your pocket.
The Switchblade Drone $40,000–$150,000 (estimated)
At 2 ft. in length and weighing 6 lb. (60 cm, 2.7 kg), the Switchblade
drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It’s a kamikaze: the
person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to
crash it into a precise target—say, a sniper. Its tiny warhead detonates
on impact. In effect, it makes fighters in the field their own air
support.
Techpet $59.99
Remember Tamagotchi? A new toy from Bandai, the company that gave us
that classic virtual pet, goes even further. Download the TechPet app,
dock an iPhone in the robotic doggy frame, and turn your phone into the
cartoon face of a canine that’s eager to be fed via touchscreen. This
puppy even recognizes gestures and verbal commands via the phone’s
camera and microphone.
The Tesla Model S $49,900
This electric four-door sedan has the lines of a Jaguar, the ability to
zip for 265 miles (426 km) on one charge—that’s the equivalent of 89
m.p.g. (2.6 L/100 km)—and touchscreen controls for everything from GPS
navigation to adjusting the suspension. Tesla is building a network of
supercharger stations—six are open so far—so owners aren’t tethered to
their home port.
Element 113 $3 million
After nine years of work, a team led by Kosuke Morita at the RIKEN
Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science in Japan has created three
atoms of the highly unstable superheavy
ELEMENT 113. As yet nameless, it
has an enormous nucleus containing 113 protons and 165 neutrons.
Wingsuit Racing $600–$2,000 per wingsuit
Flying humans wearing batlike suits competed in October in the first
ever Wingsuit Flying World Championship in China. Participants descended
from 5,000-ft. (1,500 m) cliffs, glided through a valley course and
eventually parachuted down, covering about 3⁄4 of a mile (more than a
kilometer) in about 30 seconds. The winner: South African Julian
Boulle—one of just 20 people currently qualified to compete—who finished
in 23.41 sec., a world record.
Glass is, simply put, a computer built into the frame of a pair of
glasses, and it’s the device that will make augmented reality part of
our daily lives. With the half-inch (1.3 cm) display, which comes into
focus when you look up and to the right, users will be able to take and
share photos, video-chat, check appointments and access maps and the
Web. Consumers should be able to buy Google Glass by 2014.
At 2 ft. in length and weighing 6 lb. (60 cm, 2.7 kg), the Switchblade
drone can be carried into battle in a backpack. It’s a kamikaze: the
person controlling it uses a real-time video feed from the drone to
crash it into a precise target—say, a sniper. Its tiny warhead detonates
on impact. In effect, it makes fighters in the field their own air
support.
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