'Discover' Science of 2012

    'Discover' Science of 2012

Indoor Clouds

That’s not Photoshop. The Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde has developed a way to create a small, perfect white cloud in the middle of a room. It requires meticulous planning: the temperature, humidity and lighting all have to be just so. Once everything is ready, Smilde summons the cloud out of the air using a fog machine. It lasts only moments, but the effect is dramatic and strangely moving. It evokes both the surrealism of Magritte and the classical beauty of the old masters while reminding us of the ephemerality of art and nature.

The Tesla Model S 

This electric four-door sedan has the lines of a Jaguar, the ability to zip for 265 miles (426 km) on one charge—that’s the equivalent of 89 m.p.g. (2.6 L/100 km)—and touchscreen controls for everything from GPS navigation to adjusting the suspension. Tesla is building a network of supercharger stations—six are open so far—so owners aren’t tethered to their home port.

NASA’s Z-1 Space Suit

The biggest thing NASA’s first space suits had to do—aside from keep astronauts alive—was to look spacey. So ordinary test-pilot suits were simply redesigned in a nifty silver. Things are harder now as the U.S. prepares for new deep-space missions. The Z-1 space suit provides go-anywhere garb featuring more-flexible joints, radiation protection for long stays in space and a hatch on the back that allows the suit to dock with a portal on a spacecraft or rover so an astronaut can crawl through without letting dust in or air out.

Element 113

After nine years of work, a team led by Kosuke Morita at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science in Japan has created three atoms of the highly unstable superheavy element 113. As yet nameless, it has an enormous nucleus containing 113 protons and 165 neutrons.

The Curiosity Rover 

NASA had visited Mars but never like this. Curiosity, which landed in Gale Crater in August, is a 1-ton, SUV-size Mars car with more scientific instrumentation—10 times as much, by weight—than ever sent to the Red Planet before. But it was how it got there that really made the machine sublimely cool: the rover was lowered to the ground on cables by a hovering capsule, touching down balletically in preparation for two years of exploration.

Despite a lot of talk about society going paperless, paper is still around. Humans still hand out paper versions of business cards, birthday cards, invitations and resumes. Corporations still send direct mail and catalogs to consumers. Intellipaper is a project on Indiegogo that's looking to add a whole lot of info to that paper, without taking up more space.

The developers have created a way to embed a silicon chip into regular paper to make a disposable paper USB drive. It can be inserted into any computer's USB port to share websites, personal information, images  or portfolios. The USB drive can be customized to fit any paper-based item you want, be it greeting cards, business cards or even wedding invites with registry info embedded for easy access. If fully funded on Indiegogo, the project could be a much cooler version of the QR code.

The project is currently seeking funding, but they hope to release a reader/writer device that will be able to create USB drives with whatever content a user wants and read pre-embedded paper. Depending on what tier a pledger chooses they could receive pre-embedded paper and a reader/writer.