Advanced Invention

The team at Terrafugia is about to fulfill the fantasy of every driver pilot: a consumer vehicle that can take to the highways and the skies. All they have to do is finish the first one

The Transition is not a flying car. The vehicle, set to go on sale next year, will cruise smoothly on the road and through the sky. It will have four wheels, Formula One–style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings that fold up when it switches from air to asphalt. And when the engineers at Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, let me sit inside their just-finished proof-of-concept vehicle and grab the steering wheel, it’s easy to imagine piloting this thing up and out of traffic, into the open skies.

Some 3000 ft. below the surface of Japan, the Super-Kamiokande detector is on the lookout for faster-than-light Cherenkov particles that might signal a supernova.

The fact that you may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a landmark achievement in hype. This superstar among particle accelerators, buried hundreds of feet below Switzerland and France, is the rare scientific undertaking that arrives in a frenzy of publicity. This summer, protons will begin colliding in the LHC’s 17-mi.-long circular tunnel. If everything goes according to plan, the accelerator could supply some of the biggest, most elusive pieces of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle, from details on the elusive mass of dark matter that physicists have long sought, to the framework for a Grand Unified Theory. This would explain the relationship between electromagnetism and strong and weak nuclear forces, three of the fundamental forces of nature. (The collider could also create an earth-swallowing black hole, solving both the world credit crunch and the glut of Hannah Montana-branded goods, but that possibility has been overstated, according to scientists.)

High-speed police chases are, obviously, dangerous. If they can be avoided, it’s generally accepted that they should be. That’s why the new technology by a company called StarChase is so promising: rather than chasing perps, cops can simply shoot their cars with a GPS transmitter and they’ll know where they are at all times.

The system uses a laser to aim at the back of a car, firing a GPS receiver, wireless transmitter , and battery in a little slug that sticks to the outside of the vehicle. The cops can then track the car in question without needing to keep it in sight, making apprehending the criminal much easier and safer for everyone involved.

StarChase