Large Hadron Collider



Large Hadron Collider

The biggest science experiment ever

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The Large Hadron Collider is the most ambitious engineering problem ever solved. Construction on the $10-billion behemoth—housed 300 feet underground in a 17-mile circular tube—spanned 14 years and required the efforts of 10,000 engineers and physicists. But its real engineering feat comes from the 1,200 magnets—each 35 tons in weight, 50 feet long, and powerful enough to crush a bus between them—that steer a stream of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light. These magnets are powered by 4,700 miles’ worth of superconducting niobium-titanium cable, and work only when cooled to 3.4˚F above absolute zero, colder than deep space.

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Large Hadron Collider secondary:

To make the job more challenging, the entire thing constantly attempts to destroy itself: The extreme magnetic field bends not just protons but the magnets themselves. Thick, demagnetized iron collars hold the magnets steady, but even a fraction of an inch of movement anywhere in the machine triggers an automatic shutdown, like the one that happened in September. But that’s a minor setback for the LHC on its quest to detect the Higgs boson (a.k.a. the “god particle”) and thus complete the Standard Model, on which all of particle physics is based. “This is the modern equivalent of building the pyramids,” says University of California at Berkeley physicist and Nobel Prize winner George Smoot. “It should be a source of pride for the human race.” lhc.web.cern.ch

Vital Statistics

Power consumption: 120 megawatts

Data flow: 15 petabytes/year

Proton collisions/second: 600 million

Proton speed: 11,245 laps/second

Ideas, thoughts, suggestions and questions about Best of What’s New 2008? Post them in the BOWN2008 forum. If you have questions, Popular Science editors will answer them there!

Bahrain World Trade Center

The wind-power towers

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The first skyscraper to integrate large-scale wind turbines suspends three 1,200-megawatt units between its matching 787-foot office towers. The turbines, which were completed in April, supply 15 percent of the electricity for the two buildings—roughly the same amount used by 300 homes.

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Bahrain World Trade Center secondary:

To maximize energy output, the tapered towers funnel wind between them, creating a negative pressure zone behind the buildings that draws more air through the gap. This suction effect increases wind speeds by up to 30 percent at each of the 95-foot-long rotors to boost electricity production. It also redirects wind gusts hitting the tower by up to 45 degrees off center so that they hit the turbines at a nearly perpendicular angle for optimal electricity generation.

Hillman Composite Beam

A super-strong bridge beam

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When John Hillman subjected his bridge beam to load tests, it handled a hydraulic press’s 145 tons of maximum force with ease. The Hillman Composite Beam (a winner of our 2008 Invention Awards) weighs one third as much as concrete competitors—saving 20 percent on shipping and installation costs—and can hold 50 percent more weight. The beam gets its strength from within. A concrete arch supports the weight above it, and a steel plate running lengthwise prevents the arch from collapsing. A plastic shell wards off corrosion. The first bridge built with the beams opened in August in Illinois. Next up: a 540-foot bridge in Maine, and licensing deals in Canada and Europe.

GluBam Construction

The sustainable bridge

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The bridge Yan Xiao built in Leiyang with GluBam was the town’s first. Each beam that spans the brick columns was created using Xiao’s novel process of transforming irregular bamboo into a practical building material. First he tore strips of bamboo from the stalk and arranged them in such a way as to provide the most strength. He then coated the strips with glue and compressed them in a self-built hydraulic press into beams, 33 feet long and up to three feet wide, each capable of supporting eight tons. Xiao says that the beams cost just 20 percent as much as imported lumber. Better still, rural China has a constantly replenishing supply of bamboo.

Kajima Demolition Tech

Destroying one floor at a time

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In congested cities like Tokyo, there’s barely room to swing a wrecking ball, and neighbors hate the caustic dust that implosions kick up. So the Japanese construction company Kajima developed a tidier technique, which it first used this past spring to take down a 17-story and a 20-story office tower: Knock out the ground floor, lower the building on computer-controlled hydraulic jacks, and repeat. Keeping deconstruction on the ground is safer for workers, and the orderly disassembly makes it easier to contain asbestos and other toxic materials. Kajima recycled 99 percent of the steel and concrete and 92 percent of the interior materials—55 percent is standard—and cut demolition time by a fifth. kajima.co.jp

Sony XEL-1 OLED Television

Everything a TV should be

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Hanging a television on the wall is nice. Even better is sticking it on, like wallpaper. The first organic light-emitting diode TV isn’t that thin, but at three millimeters, it’s close. (Sony has prototypes that are one tenth as thick.) It also produces stunning colors and the highest contrast possible—from brilliant white to pitch-black.

OLEDs have long promised these results, while presenting plenty of challenges. The achievement of taking OLED from a lab experiment to a consumer product is the top innovation of the year.

It took clever engineering. To optimize color, for instance, Sony placed the OLED in microscopic troughs sized to match specific wavelengths of light. So the red part of each pixel sits in a cavity that allows only the ideal shade of red to escape.

Why did a giant technology advance appear in an 11-inch screen? OLED circuitry requires a type of glass that isn’t produced in large sizes, and applying the material to bigger sheets requires new techniques. Retooling factories will cost a fortune. But companies will spend big money if they see a big market, and selling a real OLED TV, even a small one, has fired up demand. Sony promises 27-inch models soon. You could see sets of 32 inches or more, from several companies, by 2011. $2,500;

Ideas, thoughts, suggestions and questions about Best of What’s New 2008? Post them in the BOWN2008 forum. If you have questions, Popular Science magazine editors will answer them there!

Acoustic Research FPS 10 Subwoofer

Flat speaker puts rumble under your seat

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Audiovox’s 4.5-inch-high sub slips inconspicuously under your couch and fires upward to yield booty-shaking bass in music or re-create ground-
shaking explosions in action movies. It packs the power of a bulky subwoofer into a slim case by using a 10-inch speaker to push air against a second 12-inch cone that’s big enough to resonate with the very deepest sounds. $500;

LucasArts Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

A lifelike fantasy game

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his is the first videogame to emulate real-life objects, so metal bends and wood splinters along the grain. It also simulates a character’s muscles and nervous system—opponents thrash around when sent airborne or limp after a blow to the leg. (These effects are only in the PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 editions.) $60;

Sonos ZP120

A little amp with lots of power

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The ZP120 digital amplifier is the brawn of the Sonos wireless music-streaming system. About the size of a few hardback books, the amp pumps 55 watts per channel-—enough to power the largest stereo speakers—using the same technology that keeps satellites from overheating. Instead of a traditional power supply, which always provides the same high voltage, the ZP120 delivers only what the amp needs at the moment. The trick for Sonos was developing filters to shield the audio signal from stray frequencies produced every time the power supply switches voltage. $500;

Sony BDV-IT1000ES Bravia Theater System

Fat sound from skinny speakers

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This audio rig replaces giant speakers with thin bars you can hang on the wall. Using a new design, it generates full sound from 22-inch-long sticks measuring about half an inch wide by one inch deep. Traditional speakers create sound by vibrating a bulbous cone that is attached to a large electromagnet. Sony engineers replaced the big cone with a narrow, oval-shaped diaphragm. To make it vibrate, they ditched the thick iron post in standard electromagnets and instead attached a copper coil to the side of a thin metal plate. A Blu-ray-equipped receiver drives the front speakers, a center channel and (via a wireless link) two rear speaker sticks, plus a subwoofer. $2,000;

Onkyo TX-NR906

The first receiver that lets you adjust each video feed

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All video sources do not produce equal images: A cable box’s output might be too bright, a Blu-ray player’s colors may be off, and a game console’s video might be a bit dark. You can tune each input on higher-end TVs to fix these problems, but not if you run video through an A/V receiver that dumps everything into a single jack on your set. The Onkyo TX-NR906 includes its own powerful video processor and pro-level controls so you can customize up to 13 feeds in the receiver before they reach your television. $2,300;

Hitachi Ultrathin TVs

LCDs as slim as paintings

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Hitachi slimmed today’s TVs from four inches to 1.5 by improving current technology. A new diffuser sits right against the backlight yet still spreads light evenly across the screen, and a specially developed power supply is one third as thick. From $1,500 (32-inch screen); hitachi.us/tv

2009 Nissan GT-R

A 21st-century supercar, at a $120,000 discount

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The 2009 Nissan GT-R is the sports-car value of the year, if not the decade—a car under 80 grand whose performance matches that of a $200,000 supercar. Engineers scrutinized every component to squeeze out more performance while saving weight and money. Inside the twin-turbo, 3.8-liter V6’s aluminum engine block, the walls surrounding the pistons receive a coating that dissipates heat better than the typical, heavier cast-iron linings. The engine produces 480 horsepower and hurls the GT-R from 0 to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds—quicker than a Lamborghini Gallardo. The GT-R tops out at 193 mph, making it one of the fastest cars on the road, and you don’t have to be a professional driver to tap its potential. A twin-clutch system, rare in a car at this price, handles gearshifts, and an adjustable shock-absorber system can stiffen up so that the GT-R feels like a Ferrari F430. Finally, the videogame-inspired control panel displays arcana like steering angle and brake-pedal pressure, giving the driver more detailed information and more control than any other car. Now that Nissan has proven that it can be done, expect more accessible, technology-rich supercars in the years ahead. $77,000;

BMW MyInfo

Beam Google Maps to your Bimmer

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MyInfo, rolling out this year on the BMW X6 crossover SUV, lets anyone search Google Maps on a computer or smartphone and send addresses, phone numbers and notes to your car’s navigation system, whether you’re parked or on the road. The data goes to BMW Assist headquarters, which sends it to a GSM chip in the car.

Tartan Racing Boss

The robot car arrives

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“Boss,” the brainchild of Tartan Racing (a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and General Motors), was the winner of the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge, a competition of autonomous vehicles. The mission: execute tricky merging, passing and parking maneuvers as quickly as possible, while obeying California-state traffic laws. More than a dozen lasers, cameras and radars feed information about Boss’s surroundings into its “brain,” a computer that uses 500,000 lines of code to make decisions about the best way to reach its destination. Boss drove the course at up to 30 mph and took corners hard, finishing almost 20 minutes faster than its closest competitor. Its performance suggests that self-driving cars might not be so far off after all.

BMW Speed Limit Display

A car that knows its limits

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Combining images of signs taken by a camera on the rearview mirror with navigation-system data about your route, the latest European BMW 7 Series figures out your current speed limit and displays it on the instrument cluster and projects it on the windshield. The technology, developed with Siemens VDO, could arrive in the U.S. in the next year or two.

Audi Dynamic Steering

The most advanced steering system yet

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With its harmonic drive gearing—a compact, three-piece gearset previously used in lunar rovers—the 2009 Audi A4 modifies the steering ratio in response to the car’s speed. When you’re parking, one turn of the wheel covers the full range of motion. At highway speeds, the same range takes four turns. The system can also detect any potentially dangerous motion and help you correct it; if electronic sensors determine that you’re going too wide into a sharp turn, they will tighten up the steering ratio so you can get back on course with a smaller movement of the wheel. The system works three times as fast as other electronic stabilization systems.

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Lexus Wide-View Cameras

No more blind corners

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Nudge forward out of a garage, and cameras mounted on the grille and under the passenger-side mirror on the 2008 Lexus LX57 see around the corners before you do, sparing pedestrians that cross your path. A second camera provides a view of the ground beside the vehicle, so you don’t scuff those new tires on the curb. The navigation screen can display both views simultaneously.

Infiniti Scratch Shield

The finish that repairs itself

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It won’t save you from a key-gouging vandal, but the finish on the 2008 Infiniti EX and FX-model SUVs can erase scrapes caused by, say, car washes or stray branches. The clear coat contains a synthetic resin that, when activated by daytime heat and sunlight, flows into surface wounds, repairing the damage in anywhere from a day to a week, depending on temperature and the depth of the scratch. Thanks to the extra resin in the coating, the finish is more durable than most, too, showing 80 percent fewer abrasions than conventional clear coat after 50 trips through an automated car wash.

Ford Ecoboost Engines

Smaller engines for real mileage

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Fuel-saving technology does nothing for an overheated planet if only a handful of drivers use it. So Ford is aiming for up to 20 percent cuts in CO2 emissions by putting EcoBoost engines in 90 percent of its models by 2013. EcoBoost uses direct-injection and turbocharging to squeeze more power out of smaller, more efficient engines, replacing V8s with V6s and V6s with four-cylinders. A twin-turbocharged V6 EcoBoost arrives in the 2009 Lincoln MKS luxury sedan; a four-cylinder comes to other models in 2010.

Honda FCX Clarity

The first hydrogen production car

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Highways filled with hydrogen cars are still decades away, but that doesn’t diminish the achievement of rolling the first fuel-cell car off a mass-production line. To open up interior space, Honda developed its own fuel cell, a 100-kilowatt stack that packs substantially more energy into a 65 percent smaller space than other designs and squeezes neatly into the tunnel between the front seats. And by working through several generations of concept cars, Honda has gotten the once-experimental FCX to look and drive just like a gas-powered car. It even has a 280-mile range. The big difference: Nothing comes out of the tailpipe but water vapor. Three-year lease for $600 a month;

How It Works

Inside the fuel cell:
[1] Hydrogen and air flow from top to bottom in Honda’s fuel cell through wave-shaped channels [2]. Along the way, an electrolyte surface transforms the hydrogen into water and electrons. The cooling system [3] runs horizontally through the channels to keep the cell from overheating.

Beyond gasoline

The 45.7-gallon tank in the rear of the car stores compressed hydrogen, which the fuel cell between the front seats converts into electricity and water.

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Mercedes Speedshift Transmission

An automatic that stick-shift fans can love

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Conventional automatic transmissions shift too lazily for true car nerds, but most paddle-shifted automated manuals tend to feel herky-jerky around town. Mercedes’s AMG Speedshift combines the best of both worlds in a lightweight, compact package. It replaces a standard automatic’s torque converter with a series of interlocking clutch plates, which allow faster shifting than even a professional racecar driver can pull off. During our test in the powerful SL 63 AMG convertible, equipped with the seven-speed shifter, even the most diehard manual fan among us had to admit that if this is where automatics are headed, he can deal.

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Ford Capless Fuel Filler

Refueling made simple, clean and painless

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Concerns about fuel theft and spillage have made the gas cap a standard feature. Ford replaces it with a spring-loaded interior lid that closes off if anyone tries to put a nonstandard fuel-pump nozzle in the hole. The system, which rolled out this year, seals tighter than a typical fuel cap, too, reducing evaporative emissions.

3M MPro 110

The handheld projector arrives

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Laptops, cellphones and other portables can shrink only so far before their displays are unusable. 3M decouples screen size from gadget size with the first micro-projector. It can show 50-inch-diagonal images in a dark room and 10-inch images under bright light. The tech debuts bundled with a one-hour battery in the handheld MPro110. By next year, 3M expects to squeeze the projector (itself the size of a matchbox) into cellphones, MP3 players and other gadgets.

3M beat other companies in the pocket-projector race by refining a well-known design instead of developing exotic technologies such as miniature lasers. Like many tabletop projectors, this model uses a set of prisms to direct light from a lamp onto an imaging chip that sets the color and intensity of each pixel in the projection. But rather than using separate lenses around the prisms, 3M molded prisms with rounded edges that act as built-in lenses. To keep power and size down, the projector’s lamp is a one-watt LED with a special lens to concentrate the light beam so that none of it goes to waste.

The 5.4-ounce MPro110 has inputs for laptops, digital cameras and cellphones to display video at standard-definition-TV quality (640 by 480 pixels). So it’s not only a great tool for business presentations, but also the cheapest giant-screen TV. $360;

Casio Exilim EX-F1

A camera that makes time stand still

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Tales of Testing

Theodore Gray, PopSci "Gray Matter" Columnist

I was about to buy a bulky high-speed camera setup costing upward of $5,000 when the EX-F1 came along. It’s magical—essentially snapping pictures before I push the shutter button (by auto-filling its memory with 60 six-megapixel photos every second). And it captures slow-motion video at up to 1,200 frames per second. The resolution and image quality aren’t as high as in a pricier rig, but the EX-F1 is small enough to carry everywhere. As a result, I’ve caught explosive chemical reactions, the acrobatics of dragonflies, and a host of other things that happen at faster-than-human speed.

Casio’s coup was recognizing that the necessary tech—fast image sensors and processors, big memory buffers to hold the images until the memory card records them—already existed in consumer-grade camera components. And it bet correctly that amateurs like me would trade a little quality to get their hands on this kind of high-speed power.

$1,000;

Bug Labs BUG

A gadget-invention kit

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With BUG, you snap together parts to build any device you dream up. The system’s brain is the BUGbase, a tiny Linux computer with four slots for plugging in a growing range of modules. Use the GPS receiver and camera modules, for example, to build a point-and-shoot that adds location tags to photos and posts them on the Web. Write custom software in Java, or download dozens of free applications that make the modules work together. BUGbase, $350; modules, from $60;

Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card

Give any camera wi-fi and GPS

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By squeezing a Wi-Fi transmitter onto the main chip of a two-gigabyte memory card, Eye-Fi allows a camera to automatically beam photos to a computer or upload them to the Web. It can also use Wi-Fi to find its location and geotag photos to display on a map. From $80; eye.fi

Zink Imaging

The pocket printer

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In 1948, Polaroid introduced on-the-spot photo printing with the Land Camera. It continued making instant film until this year, when a successor emerged in the PoGo, a full-color, pocket-sized printer for digital cameras based on an idea that Polaroid’s founder, Edwin Land, had 30 years ago.

Land challenged his researchers, including a recent MIT grad named Stephen Herchen, to make color printers smaller by eliminating the need for liquid ink. Over the years, they explored technologies such as the heat-activated dyes used in fax machines and clear chemicals that produce color when mixed. Every method took too long or produced prints with low image quality or longevity.

The breakthrough finally came in 2000, when Polaroid developed a dye that’s clear in its solid, crystalline form but turns permanently colored when the crystals melt and change shape. Because different-colored crystals have their own melting points, it’s possible to create a full-color image with one pass of a printhead that applies precise, pinpoint doses of heat. Polaroid was developing a consumer product with this technology when it went bankrupt in 2001 and became simply a brand name for budget electronic products.

In 2005, a group of former Polaroid employees formed Zink (short for “zero ink”) Imaging, with Herchen as chief technology officer. They converted a Konica Minolta paper factory to make paper embedded with the heat-activated dyes and recruited Alps Electric to build the printer. Zink is licensing the technology so companies can build printers directly into devices such as digital cameras. But the first partnership is with its old parent company to make the Polaroid-branded PoGo, which turns out richly colored 2-by-3-inch photos. $150;

Vision Research Phantom V12

The fastest video camera on earth

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To catch every detail of the gymnastics and track-and-field competitions at the Beijing Olympics, NBC brought in the most powerful slow-motion camcorder: a prototype of the Vision Research V12. The faster the camera, the slower its video playback, and the V12 is the record holder. It shoots video at up to one million frames per second at low resolution and captures high-definition at 6,933 fps, seven times as fast as its nearest competitor, Vision Research’s own Phantom HD. The pixels in the V12’s sensor are about five times the size of those in an SLR, allowing them to absorb enough light even at ultrafast shutter speeds. To process the torrent of data, the camera breaks the task into smaller operations that run simultaneously. From $87,000;

Livescribe Pulse

The pen that listens

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In 2002 I got my first digital pen, which captured handwriting as an image file, eliminating the need for paper notes. Or so I thought. Unfortunately, my full-speed penmanship was just as illegible in electronic form. Six years later, Livescribe solved that problem. Its Pulse uses the same technology to track its location on specially printed paper, but it pairs the text with an audio recording. At a meeting, I jot only cursory notes while the pen records every sound (except the scratching of pen on paper, which it filters out). Later I can tap my pen to the pad or click with my mouse on the screen to select a section of my notes and hear exactly what people said at the time.—Steve Morgenstern, Contributing Editor

From $150;

UGOBE Pleo

Robo dino learns and adapts

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The most lifelike robotic pet can see, hear, and feel your touch. Six computer chips process the input and produce lifelike reactions, such as crying if it’s left in the dark. Pleo moves naturally using 28 motors and joints—for example, arching its back when stroked. The dino also learns from experiences (such as staying away from your noisy canary) and displays emotions. You can even download behavioral-modification packs or use the free programming kit to customize its personality. $350;

Nikon D90

The first SLR that shoots video

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This 12-megapixel SLR records high-def video by holding its shutter open even when you’re not snapping a pic (the same trick that lets it show a live preview of your shot on the LCD). Add any Nikon lens to apply unique effects, like the warped, wide view from a fisheye lens. $1,000 (body only);

Samsung AIRAVE

Perfect cell reception

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No bars at home? No problem. Airave acts like a mini cell tower, routing calls into Sprint’s network over your home’s high-speed Internet connection. Each Airave box handles up to three simultaneous calls, which can start at home and switch to a regular tower when you step outside, or vice versa. $100, plus from $5 per month;

Apple App Store

One-click cellphone downloads

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The App Store’s dead-simple interface makes it easy to search for and download games, sports tickers, news readers and other programs. One-click installation and a central repository (accessible from the phone itself) transforms your phone or iPod into a pocket-sized computer. Free to $450;

Amazon Kindle

E-books on demand

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With the paper-like legibility of electronic ink, long battery life, and the ability to hold thousands of pages, e-book readers were already quite handy. But Amazon made them even more convenient by adding a free cellular connection for plucking newspapers, magazines—even entire books—out of the air in seconds. $360; downloads from $1;

Tonium Pacemaker

Pocket turntables

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The Pacemaker is the first portable digital music player that lets you mix two songs together live, the way DJs do with a pair of turntables. The 120-gigabyte hard drive stores up to 30,000 songs, which you browse by moving your finger around a circular touchpad like the iPod’s. The gadget allows you to speed up or slow down a pair of songs so their beats match and to adjust the pitch so that the songs you mix are in the same key.
$875;

Sleek Audio SA6

Headphones tailored to your hearing

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Everyone’s ear canals have unique shapes that affect hearing; some of us pick up high frequencies better, while others are attuned to bass. These in-ear headphones are the first that let you tweak the acoustics to suit your ears—or your taste—avoiding the distortion that results from adjusting the equalizer on your music player. For more thump on hip-hop tracks, attach the bass modules to the back of each earphone, adding larger chambers for the sound to resonate. Make vocals stand out by changing the treble filter on the earpiece to one that allows more high frequencies through. $250; sleek-

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