GPS

Looking for open parking spaces in the city is one of the more teeth-grinding rituals for drivers, but researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey may have hit upon a relatively low-cost solution. They combined ultrasonic sensors with GPS to create digital maps of available parking spaces for Web-based navigation systems, according to Technology Review.

GPS may now reside in everything from our cars to our smart phones, but it once all began as a military application. So it's perhaps ironic, if not entirely shocking, that the head of the U.S. Air Force said today that the military needs to wean itself off dependence on a GPS network vulnerable to jamming and satellite-killing vehicles. DOD Buzz reports that officials have confirmed that GPS has been "jammed or interfered with recently."

Give the National Weather Service some credit for some clever crowdsourcing experiments. It has just launched a Twitter-based program to monitor tweets about severe weather, and hopes to eventually transform cars into mobile weather stations, Discovery News reports.

Millisecond pulsars left in the wake of supernovas could provide the basis for a type of "galactic GPS," radio astronomers say. A growing constellation of known pulsars could allow the scientists to make the first direct detection of gravitational waves -- a predicted consequence of Einstein's relativity theory. The concept might even help guide future spacecraft and explorers, not to mention errant galactic hitchhikers.

And you thought that lady from your car's navigation system was stern. Human-machine interface Researchers from Kajimoto Laboratory came up with this GPS navigation helmet that doesn't give directions in words, it "shows" the wearer which way to go by tugging on the appropriate ear, just like mom used to do. "Being pulled on the ear for navigation is a common situation when we were children," researchers write, "and hence, the sensation should be quite intuitive."

Ever dreamed of having a personal communicator built right into your clothing, a la Star Trek? That dream might be closer to reality than you realized. Finnish company Patria Aviation Oy has spent the last 18 months bringing to life a flexible antenna that can be worn on the sleeve of your favorite shirt. With the support of the European Space Agency (ESA), Patria created a patch with personal communication and GPS tracking capabilities that could satisfy even those on the Starship Enterprise.

Google is reported to have spent millions of dollars on its Street View project. Roy Ragsdale, a student at West Point, has done a pretty nice job of putting together a portable panorama camera setup that includes GPS and Google Earth file output for under $300, using exclusively open source tools.

Editor Mike Haney is training for the New York City Marathon with all the help from high-end running tech he can get. Read his previous posts here.

Despite my geeky leanings, I've typically run with tech no more complex than an Ironman watch. But in the spirit of the title of this column, I've recently been testing a number of sports watches, from Suunto, Polar, and Garmin, to see if I could gain anything from monitoring my effort (or lack thereof). So far, the one device I find myself frantically searching the house for before I head out is the new Garmin Forerunner 405CX. And not for what it puts on my wrist, sleek as it is, but for what it puts on my monitor later.

Kids these days. It seems that they were born into a society that spends 90 percent of its time staring at glowing rectangles, much to the chagrin of parents everywhere. Playing outside just seems like too low-tech of an option for them to bother wasting their time with. However, Bulpadok, an Australian app company, might convince them to take the screen with them outdoors, with The Hidden Park, a new iPhone-based scavenger hunt.

Your mother told you never to speak to strangers, but what if the stranger was a robot on wheels, who was lost and needed your help? Thirty-eight people in this very predicament chose to speak to the waylaid robot, whose task was to cross a busy city without a map or GPS. All it could do was ask directions.

How much air is big air? Just check your iPhone. The latest application for the iPhone is Hangtimer, which allows skiers to quantify just how big they went. Download the application for an absurdly cheap $10, and the iPhone's -- or iPod Touch's -- internal tri-axial accelerometer detects when your feet leave and touch the ground. After each jump, the iPhone displays your flight time, while a plot provides a running tally of your jumps and speed throughout the day.

Photographed from an ultra-light plane last December, these whooping cranes are being taught to fly south for the winter. Almost completely wiped out by 1940, there are now 536 known captive and wild whooping cranes in North America. But those raised in captivity will not migrate to warmer climes automatically -- they have to learn the skill.

Avoid bottlenecks with TomTom’s GO 740 LIVE. It uses the same kind of chip as a cellphone to retrieve traffic updates every two minutes, instantly recalculating your route to detour around jams. The wireless connection also allows drivers to zap info, such as their current location, to pals who own a GO 740 or future models in the company’s LIVE series.

PopSci has gone behind the scenes to find out what exactly goes on when it comes to creating digital maps such as those by Google and Where Is.

1. Shooting