For the last five years, eVolo Magazine has hosted a futuristic skyscraper design competition. Usually, the entrants imagine giant buildings taller than anything under construction today. However, the most impressive entry in this year's competition goes the opposite route, by dropping the building straight into the sea. This floating building would generate its own electricity and food, house thousands, and plunge deep beneath the waves.

How fast is too fast? According to the laws of physics, the speed of light is a good boundary, as going beyond it opens you up to all sorts of paradoxes and space-time phenomena that are usually the stuff of sci-fi. But a couple of researchers in Austria have come up with a way to compute information faster than the speed of light.

Toxoplasmosis, a common food- and pet-borne illness linked to hallucinations, personality alteration, and, since it's often carried by house pets, the stereotype of the crazy cat lady, infects around 15 percent of the US population. Luckily, a new technique that traps the parasite with gold nanoparticles, and then zaps them with lasers, should help ease the $7.7 billion the disease costs America every year.

Our solar system's 'hood may get a bit rougher sometime during the next 1.5 million years. An astronomer has given an 86 percent chance for a neighboring star to smash into the frozen Oort Cloud surrounding the outskirts of the solar system, and may scatter some comets toward Earth, Technology Review reports.

When methane and freezing cold water fuse under tremendous pressure, they create a substance as paradoxical as it coveted: burning ice. Earlier in the year, a report from the National Research Council identified the combustible water, also known as methane hydrate, as a potential source of natural gas.

Beneath the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider will help scientists seek answers to some of the most profound questions about the universe. Beyond this lofty goal, though, particle accelerators can be used for decidedly more down-to-Earth projects -- like fighting cancer, cleaning up industrial waste and even shrink-wrapping your Thanksgiving turkey. More than 17,000 particle accelerators are in operation around the world, used for radial tires, computer chips and 3-D images of molecules, among other tasks.

The world's first commercial effort at a patient-ready brain computer interface is on display over at CeBIT 2010, but don't go throwing out your keyboard and mouse just yet. Intended for patients suffering from locked-in syndrome and other communication-impairing conditions, the Intendix from Guger Technologies allows users to input text using only their brains.

They don't exactly look like the saviors of our energy economy, but that's exactly what some researchers think they could be. Gribbles -- tiny crustacean pests with a knack for digesting wood -- have long been considered a marine parasite for the destruction they cause to wooden hulls and piers. But the enzymes gribbles use in to break wood fibers down into sugars could make them the next biofuels breakthrough.

Here's one genius computer program you might consider pushing virally for science's sake. The "Quake Catchers" program aims to make earthquake detection a lot easier and cheaper by taking advantage of accelerometers built into MacBooks and other newer laptops, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Johnny Cash can't have known about carbon nanotubes when he sang about that burning ring of fire, but MIT scientists have shown how the tiny tubes can channel a ring of heat that creates electrical current -- about 100 times as much energy per unit of weight when compared with a lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery.

Rainbow trout with six-pack abs and burly shoulders have emerged from a University of Rhode Island laboratory, and could someday find their way to humans' dinner tables. That's assuming diners don't panic at the sight of the muscular ichthyoid awaiting their knives and forks.

Despite coming from a range of different backgrounds, everyone whose genome has been fully sequenced has had one thing in common: they were all healthy. But now, two teams have decoded the first genomes of people who carry genetic diseases, with one group also performing the first-ever full sequencing of an entire nuclear family.

Polymers are generally put to work as insulators, but a team of researchers at MIT has devised a way to turn polyethylene -- the most commonly used polymer -- into a conductor that transfers heat better than many pure metals. But the conversion of insulator to conductor is only half of the breakthrough; by coaxing all the polymer molecules into precise alignment, the researchers have created a polyethylene that conducts heat in only one direction.

Light is essential to vision, at least the kind we perform with our naked eyes. This is why we can see through a glass lens but not through a brick wall (though we're working on that). But what about materials that let some light pass while scattering it in seemingly chaotic ways?

Readers feeling jittery on their second or third cuppa might giggle at the concept of the Carpuccino, but few car owners will. The wacky UK invention comes in the form of a converted 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco that downs about 56 espressos per mile, the Daily Mail reports. That should only cost about 25 to 50 times the cost of running a car on gas.