Popular Science

Details are still fuzzy, but with very little fanfare it appears the world's first cell phone with a built-in projector has arrived. A company called Logic Wireless is claiming a CES debut of The Logic Bolt (in partnership with T-Mobile, no less). The phone has "razor-sharp" projections which can grow its screen size by 3000 percent and still retains a remarkably slim footprint, if the photos are any indication.

While it’s a safe bet that few Hamas members know the lyrics to “the Star Spangled Banner”, very little separates their activities from those witnessed by Francis Scott Key centuries ago. In what has become a hallmark of guerilla war, Hamas has used a mixture of low-tech weapons and simple tactics to stymie a technologically superior enemy.

I'm a non-geek, a non-Linux user and a non-male. I had never hacked anything in my life. And I had no plans -- or foreseeable need -- to do so.

Then, I discovered PureData. When an audio engineer friend mentioned the open-source programming language that uses rectangular boxes to build audio, video and graphics, I was intrigued.

After weeks of damaging midnight environmental rulings that have removed crucial endangered species protections, restrictions on mining the Grand Canyon, and allowed leasing of public lands for oil development, President Bush protected a whopping 195,000 square miles of the central Pacific’s tropical blue heart. With the stroke of a pen, he created the Mariana, Rose Atoll and Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monuments—and set aside an area the size of his home state of Texas, the largest swath of protected ocean on the planet.

Hewlett-Packard’s Firebird looks like any high-powered desktop computer. But it whispers at less than 30 decibels, while rivals are twice as loud. It gets its muscle from a high-power desktop CPU with four processors, but laptop-style components, including three graphics cards and a pair of hard drives, keep the Firebird cool, quiet and efficient.

1. Video on Demand

Jackpot: We pick winning gadgets from the year's biggest tech convention.  Courtesy Jeff Kubina; Lettering PopSci

Keep your browser pointed to popsci.com/ces2009 for up-to-the-minute coverage of the gadgets, tech trends and announcements you'll be talking about for the rest of the year.

Darwin's visit to the Galapagos in 1835 missed finding a new species that has eluded generations of scientists until now – the "rosada" land iguana.

New to science, yes, but the iguana's lineage marks one of the oldest cases of divergence from other species on the Galapagos. Scientists were surprised to date the species' origin to more than five million years ago, before some of the islands had even formed.

Ah, New Year's. The time for spirited debauchery, reflection on the year gone by, and resolutions for the year to come. On New Year's Day, most people wake up determined (through the haze of their hang-overs) to do something different this year, whether it be losing weight, learning a new skill, or to quit biting their nails. That's admirable, but for the risk-takers and more impulsive among us, keeping a new year's resolution may be near impossible, and it's due to the dope—or lack, thereof.

The Mars Desert Research Station, located in the Utah desert near the town of Hanksville, is a simulated Mars habitat that serves as a testbed for field operations studies in preparation for future human missions to Mars.

Volunteer crews live at the station, testing habitat design features and technologies. From December 27 to January 2, six college students served as the MDRS crew, as participants in NASA's Spaceward Bound program.

You’ve just landed on the Red Planet and are looking for a fresh start. Sure, that job selling respirators at the local space-hardware store sounds cozy, but it’s a dead-end career. Mars will be ripe with opportunity; you just have to figure out how to tap it. So here’s the secret: Go into construction. You’ll learn useful skills and be out on the surface, where the real action is. Explore the landscape on coffee breaks. All you need to do is stumble upon a nice deposit of precious material—like platinum or deuterium, a hydrogen isotope that could fuel fusion reactors—and you’ll have it made.

The big news in cameras is actually pretty small. A new format with the wonky name “micro four thirds” (referring to the image sensor’s size and 4:3 aspect ratio), combines the interchangeable lenses of an SLR with the compact body of a point-and-shoot. The first model, Panasonic’s G1, is about the size of the most petite SLRs but uses even smaller lenses. A design concept from Olympus shows the potential for more-diminutive future models.

The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton’s voluptuous body shape and elongated head and neck, recorded in ancient depictions of the male ruler, have long perplexed historians. But now Irwin Braverman, a professor of dermatology and an expert on visual diagnosis at the Yale University School of Medicine, is offering a theory on the characteristics, which are not found in representations of other pharaohs: Akhenaton may have suffered from two genetic disorders that affect body shape.