What are cars going to look like in the year 2015? Well, I’m guessing they’re going to look kind of like our cars to day, but maybe a touch more aerodynamic. But hey, what do I know? When asked the same question, Transportation Design students at Turin-based IED (istituto Europeo di Design) came up with something quite a bit different.

The concept design for BMW they came up with looks like it belongs in 2115, not 2015. The BMW ZX-6 Concept by Jai Ho Yoo and Lukas Vanek is full of crazy curves and lines, and while yes, it is more aerodynamic, I’m not sure just how practical it is. But hey, maybe by 2015 we won’t care about practical cars, instead purchasing our vehicles based solely on how crazy they look. If so, this one is a definite winner.

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When your aim is to travel across the great ice plains of Antarctica, a normal car or truck meant for highways and regular streets probably isn’t going to meet your specific needs. You need a vehicle designed for the wide expanses of ice down on the bottom of the world.

The Lotus Concept Ice Vehicle (CIV) is made for the Antarctic. Scooting around on ice runners rather than wheels and moved forward with a propeller, it’s definitely not like any car you’ve ever seen. It only seats one, but the chances are good that you won’t be bringing anyone to soccer practice in Antarctica. It runs on biofuel, which makes it nice and environmentally friendly, and it has a spiked foot that is lowered down onto the ice as a brake. If you’ve got to make it to the south pole in style, accept no substitutes.

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geothermal-power-process.jpgIn case you weren’t aware, below the surface of the earth there’s a sea of insanely hot material that’s constantly swirling around. When tapped, that heat source can be used as geothermal power. With so much down there, why aren’t we using it more? That’s a question asked in Australia, where a study determined that a mere 1% of Australia’s geothermal power potential could provide the nation with a whopping 26,000 years of energy. The trick is getting it out.

A report from the Australian Geothermal Energy Association lays out how it would work, including drilling down a whopping 2.8 miles into the surface of the earth to tap into that hot magma. In order to reach 20% of electricity demands using this system, it would require a $10.45 billion project that would take over a decade to complete. But hey, once it’s done you’ve got clean energy coming up from below. And that sounds just great to us.

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Of all the electric car designs we’ve seen, this one is the most puzzling yet. The Hinterland Project starts with the shape of an airplane fuselage and turns it into a sustainable vehicle. However, it looks more like an electric tin can with wheels to us. The idea is its aerodynamic shape and lightweight aluminum chassis will increase the vehicle’s range, solving one of the most pressing problems plaguing electric vehicles circa 2008.

Maybe the car’s Canadian designer Martin Aubé is onto something. Think of it this way: if car buyers can be conned into driving the millions of toaster-shaped rattletraps traveling the nation’s highways now, given sufficient advertising, there’s no reason why gullible consumers won’t snap up cars that look like swollen locomotives.

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The final frontier of wireless tech is upon us, with Intel showing off its electricity flying through the air with better efficiency than ever. While it’s not the first wireless power transmitting device we’ve seen, this one uses resonance rather than induction, and boasts 75% efficiency. Hey, that means if you send 100 watts across the room, 75 of those watts will actually make it to the other side.

For now, the prototype is in the form of two copper rings that resonate together at a certain frequency, magically transmitting electricity from one to the other. Of course the tinfoil hat-wearing cranks will want to know where that extra 25% of the obviously deadly radiation goes on its way from here to there, but Intel says never mind that; it’s safe for us, it’s just that the gadgets will get fried with the current tech.

As soon as this is perfected, we’ll be in for a techno treat. Imagine wirelessly charging up your cell phone, or quickly installing some truly wireless speakers, or placing a wireless toaster on your kitchen table. The possibilities are endless. But in this era of energy price hikes, do we really want to throw away 25% of the power just for the sake of convenience?

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What do you get when you bring together a pizza oven, some nail polish and inkjet printers? Solar cells. You and I may be scratching our heads, but the woman behind the process known as iJet, Nicole Kuepper, won two Australian Museum Eureka Prizes — Australia’s top science awards. The real beauty of Ms. Kuepper’s accomplishment — beyond the simple recipe — is that a low-heat process like this is both cost effective and easily replicated, meaning that developing countries could get everything they need for cheap, renewable energy using junk you could find at a garage sale.

How does it work? We don’t know, and probably won’t be able to find out as it has just been recently patented, but it feels like a better world already.

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To the long list of objects vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, add the human heart.

The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal — if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory.

The researchers said they had also been able to glean personal patient data by eavesdropping on signals from the tiny wireless radio that Medtronic, the device’s maker, had embedded in the implant as a way to let doctors monitor and adjust it without surgery.

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Don’t call it a flying car. It’s a “roadable aircraft.”

It’s named the Transition, and the first full-scale model is taking shape inside a former machine shop on an industrial back alley in Woburn, MA. Between now and late July, the 10 employees of angel-funded startup Terrafugia will be spending “a lot of long days, nights, and weekends” in that shop, says CEO and founder Carl Dietrich. That’s because they want to show off their concept vehicle at AirVenture—the world’s largest aviation festival, held annually in Oshkosh, WI—and there’s a lot of work to finish first.

When I visited Terrafugia yesterday, technicians were shaping the grooves in the fuselage’s carbon-fiber skin that will hold the straps for the vehicle’s rocket-fired emergency parachute. They hadn’t yet attached the folding wings to the fuselage or the fuselage to the empanage (which will hold up the dual tails), and they had yet to figure out where to put the engine’s exhaust system. “It’s crunch time,” says Dietrich.
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