Clay Dillow

Attention recruits. Those of you landing in Afghanistan in coming months may not have to engage in the sandbag stacking and trench digging usually associated with lowly grunt-dom. An $800,000 investment in an armored wall system known as McCurdy’s Armor could have Marines rapidly erecting 6.5-foot-tall mortar-, RPG- and bullet proof fortresses in less than an hour, saving the days it can take to fortify an area by conventional means and making forward-operating units more nimble.

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The body is a resilient biological structure, but there's one thing medical science, an increasing number of Baby Boomers, and the majority of professional athletes will all tell you: Take care of your joints, because once you burn up the cartilage you started with, you're not getting any more. But a breakthrough by Northwestern University scientists will now allow adult joints to naturally grow new cartilage for the very first time.

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An interesting report from CNN over the weekend: a tabletop hydrogen fuel cell recharging station could bring hydrogen power to the individual home, allowing portable devices and eventually automobiles to charge up on the universe's most abundant element cleanly from the comfort of home.

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If sustainability is key to the new energy economy, a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers has just taken a big step toward the future by developing the first photovoltaic circuit that powers itself. The circuits could eventually be packed into touchscreens and other consumer devices that would run without a battery or any other source of power, as long as they have a beam of sunlight to harvest.

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Good news for those of us that are into biomimicry. UAVs modeled after maple seeds, bone glue modeled after sea worms, shoes that let humans walk up walls like spiders -- our long wait for artificial insect silk could be nearing the end.

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Bringing a new connotation to the term "verbal contract," researchers at the Secure Information Technology wing over at Fraunhofer in Darmstadt, Germany have developed a means of creating secure, legally-binding phone archives, meaning two parties can "sign" a contract without ever putting ink to paper.

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After stirring controversy in medical circles for more than a decade, the inflammatory findings that a routine childhood immunization is linked to gastrointestinal disease and autism has been formally retracted. The Lancet -- the esteemed British medical journal that published the findings -- has pulled the case study from its published record, its editor calling the paper "the most appalling catalog and litany of some the most terrible behavior in any research."

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Boldly taking turtles where few turtles have gone before, Iran launched its satellite carrier Kavoshgar-3 rocket skyward earlier today as part of the Islamic Republic's National Day of Space and Technology. The rocket was sans satellite for the test firing, but crewing the 10-foot launch vehicle were two turtles, a mouse, and a dozen or so worms.

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A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, it wasn’t uncommon to see X-shaped bodies dashing about a solar system. But in this era, in this neck of the universe, it is decidedly strange. Yet the Hubble Space Telescope picked up just such an X-shaped debris pattern trailing a tail of dust and gravel last month that has NASA’s brain trust excited: We may have witnessed two asteroids colliding head-on for the very first time.

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Think that 9.7-inch iPad display is all the touchscreen you need? Portuguese company Displax would like to challenge that notion. The company says it is bringing to market a multitouch capable, super-thin polymer "skin" that can be applied to any material -- flat, curved, opaque, transparent, you name it -- creating a digital muli-touch surface virtually anywhere, from a wristband to a desktop to a pane of clear glass.

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It wouldn't be the Olympics without distractions; the 2006 Winter Games in Turin had their Austrian doping scandals, and the most recent Summer Games in Beijing were punctuated by an epic opening ceremony followed by rampant media censorship. Not to be outdone, Canada's Bright Ideas installation will allow visitors to the upcoming Vancouver Games the chance to control lighting installations at major landmarks in faraway Ontario using only their thoughts.

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Leaping tall buildings, punching through solid concrete walls and using public phone booths as ersatz changing rooms without anyone noticing are still beyond human capacity, but a development at Cornell University might allow us to walk on walls like Spider Man, or even dance on the ceiling like Lionel Richie.

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It's the saving grace of every slow news day: you flip on the cable news networks during the mid-day reporting lull to find live video from news choppers tailing a perp as he tries to out-maneuver local law enforcement. But the privileged vantage point that allows you to see said perp ditch his ride and leap the fence behind an apartment complex is not shared by the cops on the ground.

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President Obama made it clear in his State of the Union Address last week that he fears the American economy is on the brink of missing out on a green tech boom that could propel us out of our current financial mess and into the coming century, and it appears his concern is well-placed. China leapfrogged Denmark, Germany, Spain and the U.S. to become the world's largest maker of wind turbines last year, and 2010 is shaping up to be another banner year.

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Rumors circulated last week, but now it’s official: NASA won’t be sending manned missions back to the moon any time soon. But in what may seem like a gutting of NASA moon- and Mars-based ambitions there is a silver lining: a $6 billion investment in helping private industry bring their space launch vehicles up to human-rated capacity and a smattering of modest robotic precursor missions to the moon, Mars, Martian moons or the Lagrange points that should set the stage for later manned missions far beyond low-earth orbit.

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