The World's Fastest (Steam-Powered) Car

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On Aug. 25, Charles Burnett III smashed a record that had stood for more than a century: the land-speed record for a steam-powered car. On a track at Edwards Air Force Base in California, Burnett was clocked at up to 151 m.p.h. (243 km/h) in his British Steam Car, which is 25 ft. (7.6 m) long, has 12 separate boilers and contains more than 2 miles (3 km) of tubing. It's affectionately nicknamed "the fastest kettle in the world."

The Fashion Robot

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It might have the diet of a model — and at 95 lb. (43 kg), the weight — but at 5 ft. 2 in. (1.6 m), the HRP-4C robot model lacks the height of the Giseles and Naomis of catwalk fame. That didn't stop the HRP-4C from making its debut in March, modeling a wedding dress by designer Yumi Katsura on its black-and-silver frame. Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology developed the $2 million HRP-4C, which is equipped with doelike eyes and shoulder-length hair, as well as sound-recognition sensors and motors in her face to mimic human expressions. But with the HRP-4C's unusually long arms, rigid gait and expected price of about $200,000, flesh-and-blood models needn't worry about losing their jobs to futuristic fashionistas quite yet.

The $10 Million Lightbulb

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With the flick of a switch, Philips Electronics may have just dramatically lowered America's electric bill. In September the Dutch electronics giant became the first to enter the U.S. Department of Energy's L Prize competition, which seeks an LED alternative to the common 60-watt bulb. Sixty-watt lights account for 50% of the domestic incandescent market; if they were replaced by LED bulbs, the U.S. could save enough electricity per year to light 17.4 million households. If Philips wins the L Prize, it will claim a cash award and federal purchasing agreements worth about $10 million.
Philips' LED bulb emits the same amount of light as its incandescent equivalent but uses less than 10 watts and lasts for 25,000 hours — or 25 times as long

Teleportation

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Inching our reality ever closer to Star Trek's, scientists at the University of Maryland's Joint Quantum Institute successfully teleported data from one atom to another in a container a meter away. A landmark in the brain-bending field known as quantum information processing, the experiment doesn't quite have the cool factor of body transportation; one atom merely transforms the other so it acts just like the original. Still, atom-to-atom teleportation has major implications for creating super-secure, ultra-fast computers.

The Telescope for Invisible Stars

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It's no secret that space is cold. But in some places, it's so frigid that light can't radiate in the visible spectrum, which makes celestial bodies invisible. Now the Herschel Space Observatory is exposing them. Launched in May by the European Space Agency, Herschel scans the skies in the infrared spectrum. In order to avoid infrared interference and temperature fluctuations from Earth, it hovers in space at the second Lagrange point, about 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) away, where the gravity of the Earth and sun balance out. Herschel will operate for at least three years, during which it will watch stars and planets being born, revealing more about how the universe came to be.
Herschel is equipped with a mirror 11.5 ft. (3.5 m) in diameter, the largest ever built for use in space. The spacecraft itself is nearly 25 ft. (7.5 m) tall