Never mind that twisty compact fluo­rescent. The new energy-efficient way to light your home is with LEDs. An upcoming crop of bulbs draw 12 watts or less, edging out a typical fluorescent, and they have a more conventional shape, contain no mercury, and last at least 25,000 hours, three times as long.

They're among the first LED bulbs as bright as a classic 60-watt incandescent (about 800 lumens), and they address past problems with LEDs, such as bluish light, overheated chips and too-concentrated beams. Launch the gallery to find out how they'll do it, all within a 130-year-old form.

Click to launch the photo gallery

Most of us keep our music on our computers and our computers are increasingly mobile, but there's a disconnect between the ability to store large amounts of music on a laptop and the portability of said laptop: laptop speakers aren't worth playing music on. But a clever engineering fix by British company NXT has changed all that, conjuring big sound out of small, portable speakers powered by nothing more than a USB outlet.

Most audio amplifiers - the kind you plug into the wall - maintain a voltage of about 32 volts. That means when the music gets loud, the amp can deliver the required punch. Laptops, which must use power sparingly to preserve their portability, don't pack nearly the wallop; a USB 2.0 port produces a maximum 5.25 volts to external devices, making it impossible to power larger, high quality speakers from a laptop.

Some engineering trickery from NXT circumvents these problems by relying on the simple premise that the USB can deliver 5.25 volts all the time, even though music is not all crescendos. During quiet passages, a pair of capacitors stores unused voltage coming from the USB. The speakers monitor the music signal a few milliseconds ahead of amplification so they can release that stored up power when the interlude is over and the heavy guitar/drum combo us unleashed.

Of course, this technology is a replacement for weaker bus-powered, desktop-style speakers; pretty much any high-quality stereo speaker has an AC adapter. And the power storage is limited; the extended version of Freebird could run the capacitors out of juice, causing the volume to fall. But NXT says they've tested the speakers on a variety of musical styles with consistent success. If they can get some consumer electronics firms to hear them, the technology could be on the market by next year.

[New Scientist]

An accidental chemistry discovery could lead to a new method for making antifreeze, moisturizer and plastic bottles out of biomass rather than petroleum, according to researchers at Iowa State University.

Professor Walter Trahanovsky was using a high-temperature chemistry process to see if he could obtain sugar derivatives from cellulose. It's based on supercritical fluids, which are heated under pressure until their fluid and gas states merge. It is not quite as exotic as it sounds - supercritical carbon dioxide is used to decaffeinate coffee.

Trahanovsky and his colleagues put cellulosic materials in alcohols and subjected them to high temperatures and pressures. They got the sugars they were looking for, but they also found something else: significant amounts of propylene glycol and ethylene glycol. This was totally unexpected, Trahanovsky said.

Anyone who has ever read a body-lotion bottle would recognize the name propylene glycol - it's a key moisturizing ingredient. It is used in a variety of products, including as a food additive. Ethylene glycol is most commonly used in antifreeze, polyester fabric and plastic bottles.

The supercritical fluid process could be a better way to obtain these materials from biomass instead of petroleum. Current biomass-refining processes require strong acids or other harmful or expensive reagents, and the processes also generate hazardous waste.

Trahanovsky said the process also produces sugar compounds that can be converted into glucose for ethanol production or other uses. The Iowa State University Research Foundation Inc. filed for a patent based on his technology.

[Iowa State University News]

Looking for a DIY project this Labor Day weekend? Wrap up your summer by cooking with this mini charcoal grill, made from a repurposed Altoids tin.

The micro-grill uses a tiny Altoids Sours tin, which Instructables user vmspionage built after seeing a similar device made from a full-sized Altoids box. The larger "eBQ" uses a bent coat hanger as the grill surface; the round one ingeniously uses two small metal computer fan guards.

Instructables has a wealth of DIY grills and smokers, made from materials like terra cotta pots, match-filled condiment cups and more.

The Sours grill is powered by a standard-sized charcoal briquette and is capable of cooking wee hamburgers, tiny s'mores or a full-size hot dog, as long as you cut it down to size. Find out how to build it here.

[via Makezine]

In a mission to learn more about the sun's inner workings, NASA is planning to launch a specially shielded spacecraft in 2018 that will plunge into the solar atmosphere. The car-sized Solar Probe Plus will explore an area just 4 million miles from the star's surface, the last region of the solar system to be explored by humans.

NASA just announced five science experiments that will fly on the scorching probe, which will be protected by a carbon-fiber heat shield that can withstand temperatures of 2,500 degrees F.

When the probe is 4 million miles away, the solar disk will loom 23 times wider in the sky than it does on Earth.

The mission will help scientists better understand solar radiation. Improved solar storm forecasts could protect future long-distance space explorers who would not be protected by Earth's magnetic field.

The SWEAP solar wind experiment will count the electrons, protons and helium ions in the solar wind and measure their properties. It will also catch some in a special cup for analysis.

Another science mission will use a wide-field camera to take 3-D pictures of the solar wind as the spacecraft flies through it. Another will take direct measurements of the sun's magnetic fields, radio emissions and shock waves, and the one more will take an inventory of the sun's contents.

"For the very first time, we'll be able to touch, taste and smell our sun," said Lika Guhathakurta, Solar Probe Plus program scientist at NASA headquarters.

NASA's goals are to figure out why the sun's corona is several hundred times hotter than the surface and why it produces an accelerating solar wind. Scientists already have high-resolution images and data of the transition zone between the atmosphere and the surface, and the solar wind has been studied extensively - but still, no one can answer some fundamental questions about the sun's evolution. The only way to do it is to go to the source, NASA says. Here's hoping the spacecraft doesn't get burned.

[NASA]

When it comes to precision sensing, secure battlefield communications, and global positioning systems, DARPA knows what time it is. However, a lack of coordinated clocks is a hindrance on the battlefield and elsewhere. That's why DARPA has put its feelers out for technology that could lead to portable atomic clocks that are miniature, ruggedized versions of the massive devices that keep standardized time in laboratories around the world.

DARPA's Quantum Assisted Sensing and Readout (QuASAR) program aims to take high-performance atomic clocks like the National Institute of Standards and Technology's NIST-F1, the massive room-sized clock housed in a lab in Boulder, Colo. Doing so won't be any easier than many other challenges DARPA brings to the table, but the agency thinks advances in nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) resonators and nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamonds that exhibit single-atom-like properties could create a close analog to an atomic clock in a miniature, portable package.

Atomic clocks don't lose seconds or even fractions of seconds over time (well, that's not entirely true, but time lost is negligible; NIST-F1 will neither gain nor lose a second in 60 million years), and that opens up major possibilities for syncronisity. Such portable clocks would allow for communications systems that are far more secure less susceptible to jamming and GPS positioning that is unrivaled. DARPA also thinks they might lead to precision sensors unrivaled in resolution and sensitivity.

[Network World, FedBizOpps]

We've heard it said that Rome wasn't built in a day. And while Popular Science isn't old enough to have witnessed the Colosseum going up, we have covered in our pages some of the 20th century's most important architectural achievements rise from nothing but a dream and a blueprint.

We've combed the archives to gather some of our most important first looks at the buildings and structures that went on to define skylines around the world.

Click to launch the photo gallery

Considering the extent to which suspension bridges, skyscrapers, and towering monuments have become symbols of human progression, it's hard to believe that just a hundred, even fifty years ago, our most beloved landmarks only existed as blueprints dreamed up by earnest young engineers. Mount Rushmore had no faces on it. Commuters in San Francisco still rode ferries across the Bay. So-called towering skyscrapers rose only thirty floors.

In 1927, when New York's 57-story Woolworth Building was still the world's tallest high-rise, we continued to ponder the mechanics of installing elevators for high-rises. "Forty thousand people within four walls!" we exclaimed. "Edison and others warn us against threatening chaos."

At times, the process of planning and construction did involve a lot of chaos. Hundreds of workers died while building the Hoover Dam. Even Mount Rushmore's main sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, didn't live to see his masterpiece completed.

Needless to say, finishing projects was no easy feat, so we combed our archives to see how engineers turned empty lots, untended fields, and undisturbed bedrock into the past century's most iconic man-made structures.

Launch the gallery for PopSci's first looks at the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, and more.

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Just agree to a lifetime of hyper-accurate real-time location tracking. The future of incarceration is just one of our favorite posts this week.

This week in the future on PopSci:

• Technological Tracking of Free-Range Felons Could Make Incarceration Obsolete
• Development of Tiny Thorium Reactors Could Wean the World Off Oil In Just Five Years
• Video: Yale's Grab Lab Demonstrates an Unmanned Helicopter With a Grabbing Hand
• Climate Villain Bjørn Lomborg Does U-Turn, Says Global Warming is a $100 Billion Problem

You can win this illustration on a t-shirt. Leave a comment to put your name in the pile; we'll randomly choose and announce our winner right here. And, if you just can't wait that long, you can buy the shirt for yourself here. Good luck!

Until next time, enjoy our past weekly illustrated roundups here.

An artificial kidney powered by the circulatory system could be the first implantable device to replace kidney donation and dialysis, scientists say.

Led by a University of California-San Francisco scientist, a consortium of about 10 different research teams unveiled a new artificial kidney prototype this week, saying a room-sized version has already shown promise for the sickest patients. Fabrication processes used to make silicon chips could conceivably be used to make coffee-cup-sized devices, which could take thousands of people off dialysis machines or kidney-donor waiting lists.

The multi-institutional team, led by UCSF professor Shuvo Roy, formerly of the Cleveland Clinic, is the first to demonstrate technology that could be feasibly downsized into a transplant device.

It's a two-stage system involving thousands of nanoscale filters placed in a "BioCartridge," which would remove toxins from the blood. A "HemoCartridge" bioreactor made of engineered renal tubule cells would mimic the metabolic and water-balancing roles of a real kidney. The system uses a patient's blood pressure to perform filtration without the use of pumps, according to a UCSF news release.

Currently, transplants and dialysis are the only ways to treat kidney failure. An implantable device would obviously be preferable, but so far, scientists have not been able to come up with a system that mimics everything the kidney can do.

The new system relies on the latest advances in nanotechnology and tissue generation, Roy said. He hopes to use silicon-fabrication technology to make the device small enough for transplant.

"This could dramatically reduce the burden of renal failure for millions of people worldwide, while also reducing one of the largest costs in U.S. healthcare," he said.

[ScienceDaily]