Best Of What’s New:2009

Auto Tech

2010 Mercedes S400 BlueHybrid

The hybrid of the future

The Mercedes S400 BlueHybrid is the world’s first production car to shift from the nickel-metal-hydride batteries in today’s hybrids to a lighter, more-powerful lithium-ion battery designed expressly for an automobile. The results are impressive. The large, luxurious flagship sedan returned 29 highway mpg during our testing—a 30 percent gain over the V8-powered S550 version—and 21 mpg in the city. It achieves these numbers by combining a downsized V6 with a 20-horsepower electric motor and a 0.9-kilowatt-hour li-ion battery for a total of 295 horsepower, giving it a 0–60 time of 5.4 seconds. Unlike with most hybrids, the compact battery doesn’t hog trunk space (it fits under the hood), saddle the car with excess weight, or add several thousand dollars to the price. Starting at $88,825, the Mercedes actually costs $3,650 less than the V8 version. But the S400 is only the beginning. Mercedes says the entire S-Class lineup could go hybrid in coming years. This fall at the Frankfurt Auto Show in Germany, Mercedes unveiled a glimpse of that future in the concept S500, a plug-in hybrid S-Class that could top 70 mpg while delivering a 5.5-second blast from stoplight to 60 mph. Expect a slew of other automakers to follow with some form of lithium-ion-powered hybrid, plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle in the next two to three years.

Health

3M/Littmann Electronic Stethoscope Model 3200 With Zargis Cardioscan

The scope that never misses a beat

The stethoscope is older than the x-ray, the ballpoint pen, Popular Science and pretty much everything else in your doctor’s office. Now, 190 years after its invention, the go-to diagnostic tool hanging around every doc’s neck has earned a modern makeover. The sound-amplifying 3M Littmann Electronic Stethoscope 3200 listens to a patient’s heartbeat—lub-DUB, lub-DUB—and beams the beats to Cardioscan software that detects abnormalities.

Even top physicians have trouble discerning the swishing sounds that result from irregular surges of blood after the lub from the ones that follow the DUB. Called murmurs, the former are harmless, but the latter can indicate ailments such as congenital heart defects, holes in the heart wall, and constricted or leaky heart valves that interrupt blood flow. If the heartbeat sounds remotely atypical, many doctors prescribe a conclusive, and expensive, echocardiogram test.

3M’s stethoscope eliminates that guesswork. It transmits heart sounds to a doctor’s PC by Bluetooth, and Cardioscan renders a near real-time graphical representation of the sounds onscreen. The software then analyzes the sound waves and highlights minute abnormalities that signal harmful murmurs. The doctor can play the sound back at half speed to diagnose a problem more confidently, save the file to the patient’s chart, and e-mail it all to a cardiologist to confirm the diagnosis. Early tests of the system suggest that it could eliminate more than eight million unnecessary echocardiograms and cardiologist visits a year, saving some $9.4 billion and, even better, catch more of the dangerous murmurs. For doctors, and anyone with a heart, this stethoscope’s upgrades are well worth the two-century-long wait.

Home Tech

Bosch Full Force Technology

Nail guns retooled with power, not heft

When you pull the trigger on a pneumatic nail gun, a valve releases compressed air to push a piston downward and drive the nail. But most nail guns steal some of the piston’s force to pressurize a return chamber that shoots the piston back after each discharge. This robs the tool of its full power. Bosch’s new line of pneumatic nailers eliminates the return chamber, instead firing a second blast of compressed air to reset the piston. The result is a gun that’s 20 percent smaller yet 10 percent more powerful than anything else out there. With its center of gravity closer to your hand, the gun is easier to control, too.

Gadgets

Canon EOS 5D Mark II

A still camera changes moviemaking

This year, a digital camera snapped the official presidential portrait for the first time. Also this year, the same camera shot commercials, indie films and even parts of network TV shows. That camera was the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, the first digital SLR that shoots full high-definition video.

The Mark II thrills videographers because, unlike similarly small camcorders, it can use a vast collection of high-quality lenses, letting them set up precisely composed wide-angle, telephoto or fixed-focus scenes. Photographers, meanwhile, love it for the large, 21-megapixel image sensor that captures views the same size as 35mm film does. The trick for Canon was adding motion to those gigantic shots, since most video-shooting still cameras take far smaller, easier-to-encode pictures. Engineers had to design a processor powerful enough to convert 21 megapixels to two—the resolution of 1080p HD video—and repackage the data into a standard movie format, 30 times a second. Despite this feat, the camera maintains a respectable two hours of battery life in video mode, giving filmmakers a portable alternative to big, five-figure movie rigs. So to the camera that’s a hit with both Hollywood and the president, we say hail to the chief gadget breakthrough of the year.

Home Entertainment

Microsoft Project Natal

The Xbox ups the Wii’s ante

Nintendo brought us the notion of playing games by waving a controller, but Microsoft showed off something even better this year: gaming with no controller at all. A prototype system dubbed Project Natal lets Xbox 360 games respond to anything from full-body lunges to subtle hand gestures, voice input and even facial expressions. Unlike the Wii, you don’t hold anything. Your movements and voice control the game.

The hardware component of the Natal system, which sits above or below the TV, includes a color video camera, an infrared emitter and sensor that give it depth perception, a mic that figures out where you are, and a microprocessor to crunch all that data. The software component is the true breakthrough, though, digesting data in real time from 48 points on the body plus audio input and delivering perfectly smooth game control. There are still lots of questions about Project Natal, including price and delivery dates, but Microsoft has clearly shown that for innovative gameplay, it has all the right moves.

Aviation & Space

NASA Kepler Space Telescope

The alien hunter

You’d be hard-pressed to get a NASA scientist to come out and say that the Kepler space telescope is designed to find aliens. Put it this way, though: The goal of the probe, which was launched in March, is to find planets much like our own in distant star systems—Earth-size bodies orbiting their stars in the sweet spot where the temperature is appropriate to support, just maybe, alien life. Using a photometer that’s more than three feet in diameter, Kepler is now continuously observing some 100,000 stars located between 600 and 3,000 light-years away. It’s looking for the faint dimming of a star that occurs when an orbiting planet passes in front of it. Observe three such blips on a strictly periodic schedule over the course of three years, and you have a planet with a one-year orbit. If the star is approximately the same size as our sun, it could be the center of a planetary system much like our own—and that planet could be habitable. Scientists hope that Kepler could find dozens of habitable planets during its three-to-four-year mission.

Recreation

Sea-Doo GTX Limited iS 255

A personal watercraft puts on the brakes

Rocketing along the water at 60 mph in a personal watercraft (PWC) is a lot of fun, but it’s not traditionally the safest pastime. PWCs make up less than 10 percent of recreational boats yet account for 24 percent of all accidents, in large part because they have no brakes and cannot be steered when the throttle is released. After eight years of research and development aimed at reversing those gloomy statistics, Sea-Doo finally unveiled the GTX Limited iS 255, the first PWC with on-water braking.

Conventional PWCs merely slow to a stop after you let go of the throttle, but when a rider squeezes the Sea-Doo’s bicycle-like hand brake, a computer cuts the power so the forward jet quickly stops thrusting. Calculating the precise amount of thrust needed to counter the forward momentum, the computer also drops an aluminum gate up to two inches below the hull, creating drag and reversing the thrust to slow the craft down.

This complex orchestration can bring a Sea-Doo traveling at 50 mph to a dead stop in about 100 feet—half the distance of a brakeless PWC. But this isn’t just the safest PWC on the water; it may also be the most comfortable. A unique gas-shock-equipped full suspension—another PWC first—swallows choppy water and can be adjusted on the fly for either a stiffer, performance-oriented ride or a cushy cruise. Look for the braking system and full suspension in three additional Sea-Doo models for 2010, including the newly upgraded 260-horsepower GTX Limited iS 260, and for the braking system alone in four other models.

Green Tech

Steward Advanced Materials Thiol-SAMMS: The Toxin Terminator

A white powder that can absorb more than half its weight in mercury

This simple-looking white powder can get mercury-contaminated water 100 times as clean as any other method, for about half the cost. Each grain is actually a carefully engineered molecular sponge designed to absorb more than half its weight in mercury.

The product of more than 15 years of research, Thiol-SAMMS is made of silica molecules assembled into a spongelike pattern of holes, packing the surface area of a football field into just one teaspoon. Sulfur atoms, which can bind poisonous mercury, coat each of the minuscule holes. When the powder meets a tainted liquid, mercury seeps inside and bonds with the sulfur to instantly form a stable powder safe for landfills—the first time anyone’s been able to send mercury waste to the dump without an expensive separate step to neutralize the toxin.

SAMMS has successfully cleaned wastewater in a variety of settings, including a coal plant, an offshore oil rig and a chemical manufacturer. Four treatment tanks, each with a 10-pound load of the product, can treat about a million gallons of water. Soon SAMMS cartridges might help clean up lakes, streams and sewers. Thiol-SAMMS can also recover precious metals such as copper and gold, and researchers are now switching out the sulfur for other atoms so that it could mop up radioactive waste.

Computing

Wolfram Research WolframAlpha

Delivering answers instead of links

A typical search engine is a reference librarian: Ask it a question, and it suggests where to find the answer. WolframAlpha, physicist and software guru Stephen Wolfram’s lifelong labor of love, is the impatient geek who overhears your query and leaps in with the answer. Enter a few words into the Alpha homepage, and the magic begins. It runs a series of algorithms that use context and probability to interpret what you’re asking, scours more than 10 trillion pieces of data that have been painstakingly curated and sourced by a team of 200 researchers, compiles a series of answers by culling the information (using Mathematica, the computational software Wolfram built 20 years ago, which helps fund Alpha), and then presents the answers in text, graphs, tables, charts or maps. The engine can show you the exact position of the moon on any day in history, compare the results from your medical test with those of the wider population, and generally answer anything that calls for computing or referencing trusted facts, whether from physics, finance or football. As for the name “Alpha,” Wolfram sees this as the start of a decades-long project to build a system that can compute all human knowledge. Says IBM emeritus computer scientist Gregory Chaitin, “It’s the first step toward a real artificial intelligence.”

Security

X-Flex Blast Protection System

The world’s toughest wallpaper

X-Flex is a new kind of wallpaper: one that’s quite possibly stronger than the wall it’s on. Invented by Berry Plastics in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, this lifesaving adhesive is designed for use anyplace that’s prone to blasts and other lethal forces, like in war or natural-disaster zones, chemical plants or airports. To keep a shelter’s walls from collapsing in an explosion and to contain all the flying debris, you simply peel off the wallpaper’s sticky backing, apply the rollable sheets to the inside of brick or cinder-block walls, and reinforce it with fasteners at the edges. Covering an entire room can take less than an hour.

X-Flex bonds so tightly, it helps walls keep their shape after blast waves. Two layers are strong enough to stop a blunt object, like a flying 2x4, from knocking down drywall. During our tests, just a single layer kept a wrecking ball from smashing through a brick wall. The wallpaper’s strength and ductility is derived from a layer of Kevlar-like material sandwiched by sheets of elastic polymer wrap. The combination works so well that the Army is now considering wallpapering bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Civilians could soon start remodeling too—Berry Plastics plans to develop a commercial version next year.