Teleportation

Teleportation, the idea of moving from point A to point C without traveling through the space between, has been around for thousands of years, the first recorded claim of teleportation coming from Buddhist history, in which the Buddha was reported as teleporting between his home in India and Sri Lanka, and later back.
Two kinds of teleportation have been identified in fiction.  In one, the item to be teleported is broken down into its component atoms, typically to translate it into energy or a fast moving signal, and reassembled on the other end.   People have pointed out that this means that teleportation of a person is killing them to replace them with an identical clone that has the same set of memories.   If this kind ever exists, I think that I will not teleport myself, but that it will become routine to teleport objects.   If I buy something at the hardware store, rather than put it into my car and drive it home, I will teleport it directly home, and then drive there alone.   Vehicles will only be required for the transportation of living things.  This would be a big advantage to me, since sometimes I buy things at home improvement stores that are very difficult to fit in my smallish car.
In the other, space is bent, causing an extreme shortcut between point A and point C, the item to be teleported is pushed through this shortcut, thus bypassing all the point B that is in between the two.  The space is then un-bent.  Since the item remains intact at all times, it would be safe to teleport people using this system.   This may have some strange energy requirements, and repeatedly bending and un-bending space can't be good for it.
In any case, either of these teleportation systems would revolutionize the world forever if done reliably.  For one, transportation is now obsolete for anything not alive.  Sure, your factory could pay a truck to haul it to the store, as is done now, but it will almost assuredly be cheaper to just teleport the widgets over.   The transportation industry's loss will be the rest of our gains, as this will mean lower costs, which could lead to lower prices if the extra money is not simply absorbed as extra profits.
But more noticeably, space travel.   The international space station was painstakingly built over years, with many rockets each hauling up one additional part until today's current structure, the size of a football field, was in place.  With teleportation, the entire structure could be built on earth and then teleported into orbit.  Even if the teleporter had to supply the difference in potential energy, which seems like a certainty if there's anything realistic about this at all, this would cost far, far less than all the rockets that were required.   If you're using the reassembling type, the astronauts would then have to travel up by rocket, but when they arrive, all of their food, tools, scientific equipment, and computers are all already in place.   If you're using the portal method, the astronauts could just directly teleport to the station, and rockets would be obsolete.
And space colonies could be constructed on earth's most brutal deserts, like the Atacama desert on the Peruvian/Chilean border.  When we verify that the station is able to sustain human life, it's then teleported to a distant planet, such as Mars.   Humans arrive there, either by rocket or portal, and teleporters allow the exchange of goods between earth and the colony.  Even if energy can't be directly teleported, fuel or charged batteries could, and if signals can't be teleported, then UUCP commands over a small, say, USB stick, could.

Will Wheaton's Laser Jackhammer

A while ago on July 13th, Will Wheaton proposed that the jackhammer that was annoying him at the time be replaced with a new system, that would, instead of using a vibrating hammer to break apart the rocks and concrete of the urban jungle, vaporize it with lasers. Mr. Wheaton feels that this would be quieter, which would disturb his work significantly less.

An interesting idea for sure, and it would certainly change urban renewal forever. Unfortunately, it would come with some strange side effects. For one, lasers do not remove the rock so much as heat it to about 1200 degrees, at which time it chemically changes to carbon dioxide and a fine mist of glowing orange chunks of calcium oxide that will instantly ignite everything they touch. Elaborate safety systems will be required to ensure that your construction workers do not routinely set either themselves, or passing pedestrians, on fire. In order to prevent this, a vacuum system will suck the molten rock into sealed containers for later re-use.

The energy use of this system will be somewhat extreme. Just like water, most rocks resist being heated up and cooled down, especially the limestone that a typical city like the kind Mr. Wheaton lives in is made of. A power plant capable of putting out some 50 megawatts, the energy used by an entire block of Mr. Wheaton's city, would be required to keep the lasers firing, the vacuum pulling, and the other safety systems containing the mess. If we just plugged this in, brownouts would be likely, and portable power systems are unlikely to keep up with the load. At least, not without being louder than the original jackhammers were.

Lastly, this system might not be quieter. While the sound would likely be less irritating than the repetitive, machine-gun-esque thumping of a jackhammer, it would almost certainly make a loud whirring noise while in operation. The vacuum pump that pulls the heated rock away makes noise. The power use makes a loud hum. The rock makes sounds as it heats up, and chemically disintegrates, plus if any water hits the rock, it vaporizes with a loud hiss. The noise would be continuous, and almost certainly distracting.

As irritating as the construction is, the jackhammer is unfortunately a better solution for the moment. As one possible improvement though, many jackhammers are gasoline fired, making them unnecessarily loud. Instead, we will replace the gas motor with an electric one, which makes no sound by itself. The jackhammer's only sound is now the metal hammer striking the rock, making a tapping sound as it does so. If we then insulate the office buildings a little better, the sound will become unnoticeable to the people working above.

Reactionless EM drive

Recently, a Chinese physicist claimed to have invented something that was previously only science fiction. I'm going to have to explain. Most of our motion is thanks to Newton's 3rd law, which states that for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. In other words, to move forward, something else must be pushed backwards. When I walk, or drive, or take a train, my shoes or the vehicle are pushing the earth backward, to push me forward. The earth is pushed back a negligible amount. This is bad news for rocketry, as there is now a tyranny of fuel requirements. In order for the rocket to move, it must eject fuel. The fuel has weight. More weight means less thrust for any particular expenditure of fuel. The rocket must be super powerful to move both itself, and the fuel required to move it, which requires still more fuel (because the additional fuel has mass, causing additional inertia). So science fiction writers proposed the reactionless drive, in which no fuel is ejected. Instead, energy is inputted into the system, and somehow directly transferred into motion. This way any energy, such as solar power, nuclear power, or other systems that don't involve a constant stream of exhaust, could keep the rocket moving. The rocket would be much lighter, and thus easier to launch, maneuver, and power. The EM drive is, if the reporting about it is correct, exactly that reactionless drive. Microwaves are bounced around in a container, imparting their energy in the desired direction of motion. Microwaves have essentially zero mass, and can be produced by electrical activity. Since electricity can be generated by all kinds of systems, any of these systems can power the rocket. The drive as described now is not very efficient. Only 2% of the inputted energy becomes motion, the rest becomes heat, noise, and other wasted energy. This drive could not launch a rocket from the earth's surface, and would only really be useful for a rocket that is already in space. However, we can expect refinement of the device as time goes on. And someday, in the distant future, a spacecraft will launch, unfurl its solar panels, and use a reactionless drive like the EM drive to speed it on its way to a distant star. A laser system in solar orbit is tracking the system and providing a steady steam of power. The craft accelerates, going faster and faster until it is traveling at a large percentage of the speed of light. After years of accelerating, it then reverses the process, slowing down until it arrives at a planet, orbiting the distant star. It then deploys its payload. Perhaps this is a scientific probe, to bring data of this distant world to scientists on earth. Perhaps this is a colony constructor, bringing a human colony to a distant world. Perhaps it is something that I can't even conceive of yet. But whatever it is, it will be glorious.

Radiation Pigeons

When the Chernobyl nuclear plant near Pirpyat, in what is now the Ukraine, melted down in 1986, it was a worldwide disaster.   Radiation spread as far away as Kansas, and Pirpyat is now massively radioactive, and judged uninhabitable.  A few very stubborn people live there, and made an incredible discovery.  A type of yeast there developed the ability to eat gamma radiation.  As food.    This species of yeast is also universally found in pigeon feces.
Gamma radiation is the lowest-mass type of radiation produced from radioactive decay.   It takes several feet of lead to stop it due to its high energy,and it's absolutely hazardous to human health in the same way as touching a red hot stove would be.   Also, outer space is absolutely full of it, which is a hazard to would-be space travelers.  
These two facts can be combined to form two mad inventions, and I'm not sure which one is crazier.
One, we can clean up radioactive spills by spreading bread all over the affected area and then releasing some pigeons, which can easily be caught in most major cities in North America and Europe.   When these pigeons poop all over the place, the yeast will get right to work eating up all the radiation, making the area inhabitable years sooner than it would otherwise.
Two, we can keep a thin layer of pigeon poop in the outer hull of space going vehicles.   In the depths of space, the yeasts will absolutely feast on the radiation, and only very little would reach the astronauts.  Space travel would be lighter, cheaper, and safer.

Cooling Fountains

Fountains are a common civic decoration, in front of buildings, in parks, and in all sorts of locations because we humans just can't get enough of that flowing water. Both the visual element of water spraying into the air, and the sound it makes as it trickles back to its source evoke some very pleasant instincts for us. Unfortunately, fountains are surprisingly expensive. The water must be pushed against gravity for a surprisingly high energy cost. The water will quickly grow full of slime and clog the machines unless regular cleaning is involved, or poisonous water. However, fountains give me an interesting idea. Cars and computers are often cooled by a flowing liquid. This is an old technology. The liquid flows through the hot areas, taking heat with it. The liquid then flows through a radiator, which has a much larger surface area and can disperse far more heat. The liquid is then cool, and can be sent back to the hot areas. Hence my next idea. In my idea, a large radiator is replaced with a fountain, which spews hot water out of the ground using a pump, producing a fancy geyser. The hot water cools significantly in contact with air, until it hits the small "lake in the fountain, and is sucked back into the system to cool the machinery again. Algae and mildew can't build up in this system, as the water is routinely heated by well over 50C, and potentially up to boiling temperature. Even if it could withstand the hot end of the scale, the repeated heating and cooling would kill any living thing by thermal shock alone. The fountain is pretty, and the machine is using a house-sized piece of atmosphere as a radiator. It's sort of efficient...and artistic!

Dark Energy

We know that our universe is expanding. This is contrary to what we know about physics: Gravity pulls all matter together, and the universe has a very large amount of matter, so this matter should be pulling itself together. Not so -- every distant object we can see is moving away from us at an ever-growing rate. One proposed explanation for this is Dark energy -- a hidden energy spread throughout all space that is accelerating everything away, and fills the fabric of the entire universe. If it exists, it represents 73% of all mass-energy of the universe. And I want to use it to power my gadgets. Wait, what? A dark energy to electric converter would gain power from fundamental facts of existence without having to look for external fuel. The only waste product would be heat, and the more you use it, the more you slow down the expansion of the universe. It would be interesting to see if this only slows it down in the area, suggesting an even spread of energy that can be used up, or if it slows down the universe, suggesting some sort of cosmological constant. All other forms of energy would be obsolete, and all of what I previously wrote about unlimited energy sources would come to pass. Of course, if we used too much, we might accidentally trigger a big crunch. In the big crunch, gravity overwhelms the universe's expansion, and the universe starts to pull together again. Some physicists even describe the "arrow of time" reversing, meaning that time goes backwards to the big bang, but they've never offered more than a hand-wave to justify this claim. This big crunch would have some rather inconvenient events when distant stars began interfering with asteroid orbits, leading to more large asteroid collisions. Then when those stars get too close to us, Earth fries. Eventually the entire universe gets mashed into a single point of zero dimensions. It may trigger a second big bang at that point, or it may just sit in near-non-existence for the rest of time. The only reason I'm not holding my breath on this is that we're not even entirely sure that dark energy really exists. It may be a completely different thing that cannot be tapped for energy.

Nuclear Bomb Detector

Via Slashdot, I have heard today that a teenaged engineer has produced a machine that can detect the presence of nuclear bombs. The most surprising thing is that it does so with a fusion reactor. Wait, what?
Apparently this young engineer has been producing fusion reactors for the past three years (although apparently not energy efficient -- more energy is required to contain it than it produces), and they produce neutrinos. Neutrinos are very very small particles. So small, in fact, that when dropped, they can pass through the entire earth without hitting anything, slipping through the tiny space between the nucleus of an atom and the electron shells. His previous fusion reactors discarded the neutrinos as waste.
However, this young engineer also noted that radioactive atoms are unstable, and often disturbed by neutrinos. This makes them far more likely to decay and put out radiation. So he's set up a scanner that detects radiation before and after flooding the cargo container with neutrinos, and noting what type of radiation was produced. If it matches the profile of uranium or plutonium decay, then it's 99% certain that an atom bomb has been concealed in the container.
Before this discovery, the search for smuggled atomic bombs was done by manually searching the containers. This had the minor disadvantage that very few containers actually got searched. Genius.
Our excellent engineer, who has more than four times my intelligence at half my age, expresses an interest in getting a PhD in Nuclear chemistry, and doing government work.

Sci-Fi Strikes Again

According to a coworker of mine, a physicist has a device the size of a small car, which holds some ten trillion positrons in containment, and has a wand attachment that can fire them. Positrons, are, of course, anti-electrons, and annihilate electrons on contact, producing a burst of energy, usually heat, light, or sound. (Although sometimes you only get neutrinos out of it.) So when fired, this produces a little beam of light from annihilating the air that it touches, and a strange sucking sound as air rushes in to fill the vacuum.
He then pointed out that technology tends to, over time, cheapen and miniaturize. This machine might be the size of a car and cost more than the entire neighborhood that I live in, but one hundred years from now it'll probably be the size of a flashlight, and be purchasable for a few of whatever they use as currency then in a corner store. It would be useful as a cutting tool, as it would make a tiny part of anything you touched to it literally cease to exist.
So in short, this machine is the precursor of George Lucas's lightsabers. With one major distinction. Lucas's lightsabers could be stopped by each other. This thing's beams would go right through each other if you had more than one.
This would not be the first time that science fiction inspired a real world invention. Plasma shields existed in various sci-fi productions for years before NASA built a real one to deal with the real problem of space dust. (Because collisions with even tiny chunks of dust are a problem when they occur at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.)

Teleportation

Teleportation, the movement of objects from point A to point C without passing through the space between, actually does happen, on the quantum level. Individual atoms have been known to teleport around, though macro-sized objects, things at our level, do not. Developing some means of actually doing so would revolutionize hundreds of industries, from manufacturing (why weld when you can just teleport the steel into the right places) to transportation (Instead of bothering with boats and trucks, goods are teleported from the factory that made them to the store that sells them....or even to the buyer's home) to mail (the post office only needs one facility now: teleportation central).
Attempts to bring this to fruitition often involved some very strange ideas indeed. There was a guy who was popular when I first came to the internet, and surprisingly is still around. Alex Chiu, a rather odd businessman and philosopher, was hawking his "immortality rings," which appear to be some sort of re-machined industrial washer that he then magnetizes and claims that it provides immortality to the wearer. Wouldn't the world be crowded if everyone was immortal, people asked him? He responded in the affirmative...and then answered that a teleportation machine that he invented. It involves a series of coils, which according to Mr. chiu's beliefs about atoms, would convert the atoms into a signal which could then be transmitted to the receiver. I find this idea strangely popular, especially with string theorists.
If human-sized object teleportation is possible, by what means could it occur?

Picoengineering

I thought it was science fiction. I thought it was comic book stuff. I thought it was manifestly insane, but someone has done it. Popsci magazine reports that picoengineering was invented a week or two ago.
For the experiment, one of the electrons in a helium atom was replaced with a muon, which has a similar charge, but is much smaller. And then an interesting thing happened: The helium started acting, chemically, as hydrogen. This has many interesting implications.
For one, if this turns out to be inexpensive enough, you could substitute cheaper materials by bind away some of the electrons. Need thalium? You could substitute lead. Substitute Sulfur for Phosphorous.
Nanoengineering is the production of things ten to the minus nine power meters in size, a billionth of a meter, the size of atoms. Picoengineering is three times smaller than that, dealing with the internal components of the atoms themselves.

Wintermobile

I have what I think is an interesting idea for a cold weather car. Cars generally drive through environments colder than their engine, even in the desert, though this will gain the most usefulness in the more freezinger parts of the world. The car would have pipes going all throughout its outer chassis. The pipes would be full of an antifreeze and water mixture, and would end on either side in a bypass valve.
In cold weather, the driver can flip a switch, to open the valve, and now circulate the coolant in the car around the entire body of the car. Much heat leeches out the top, into the driving compartment, and out the back. In cold weather, it'd feel nice.
The engine would also benefit. Gasoline engines work by heat exchange -- the more heat it can pump out, the more efficiently the engine works. Coolant would come in cold as can be, and the solid parts of the car would have fewer heat differences over time. With fewer heat differences, there's less thermal stress.
I think taking this car to a hot region, though, like a jungle or a desert, would be worse than a conventional car.

Schrodinger's Car

All that non-physicists tend to remember about Erwin Schrödinger was his cat thought experiment. The one with the cat in the box with one atom of radioactive material and the diabolical setup that will kill the cat if the atom decays, and the nonsensical result of the cat being both alive and dead at the same time. And suddenly, my unsleeping mind goes to some very strange places.
I'm imagining a car that works by controlling, sort of, quantum teleportation. It restricts the teleports to one particular direction, so you move forward at a random, not readily predictable speed. Teleporting against that direction is prevented by a brownian-ratchet type of mechanism. Given this much, it wouldn't even really need fuel. You will get there, eventually.
It's probably not even technically possible, but it would be so much fun to try.

Entangled Tablet

So lately I've seen searches in the analytics for a "Quantum Entanglement NIC." This isn't possible under current technology, but it gives me an excellent idea.
A Quantum Entanglement network interface card would be useful because it would be linked to another card, and the two cards would act as if physically touching, even if separated by miles, astronomical units, or even lightyears. Literally instantaneous and uninterceptable communication. If it had a slot for a RJ-45 or wireless connection on top of that, so much the better. If it didn't, well, there's enough add-on slots in the desktop computer's motherboard to have a traditional network interface card.
Anyway, my idea is that we have an internet tablet (think like an i-Pad), and it has a quantum entanglement NIC connection to your desktop computer. The tablet will not run its own software, but instead be a mobile peripheral to your desktop machine. It is a terminal that fits in your briefcase, backpack, or other carrying device. It probably doesn't fit into a pocket or purse, but they're working on those. You would have all the features of your desktop machine, like high speed internet, your data, games, and so on, in a portable and useful form. The only thing the tablet wouldn't do well is type, unless your brought some sort of keyboard attachment.
You could have one entanglement tablet per quantum NIC installed, up to as many expansion slots as your computer has. This further expands the usefulness of computers if they have multi-user operating systems installed, and most these days are, for security and remote access's sake. One computer could be shared by four or five people, who access it through their tablets.
If you're not prone to losing physical objects, this would be good for security, too. It is literally not possible to intercept a quantum entanglement. There is no signal to snoop. However, if you do lose the tablet, you've basically given your computer over to whoever takes it, at least until you shut it down and remove the entanglement card. That would be scary.
Now, the current obstacles to this are in entanglement itself. For all its promises, quantum entanglement is a very fragile phenomenon. Entangled particles are difficult to keep entangled. If you disturb them, the entanglement is lost. If you read or write to the connection, it typically breaks immediately after. We're not even sure that a permanent entanglement is possible in theory. We're not even sure if that instantaneous effect works over long distances, or if it's limited to the speed of light like everything else. The current world record for entangled particles brought them 16km apart before the connection was lost. If you want a NIC, it's going to have to read or write so much more than than 1 bit before failing.

Nieman's Physics

for the New York Times, artist Christopher Niemann proposes physics laws of parents. Often even slightly accurate.
Eating all cold food would indeed take energy from your body to heat it to body temperature so that you could digest it. As would standing around in extremely cold areas. The Laziness explanation of Newton's first law (Object at rest stays at rest) is one of the funnier ones. As is his explanation of elasticity.

Waterplane

When I was 12, I wanted to be an astronaut. Several things screwed this up. The first one being that I suffer from major motion-sickness. I have to dope myself up to the gills to not heave up my latest meal should I travel by boat or plane or train. (Another thing being that I'd have to join the air force and do well in it, but that's another story.) I do okay in cars for some reason.
The big reason for motion sickness has to do with your vestibular system in your ear. When what you see doesn't match what your system reports the local gravity to be, your body concludes that you're in a whirlpool, and decides that you need to be a little lighter to escape. Up comes your stomach contents. The misery of this also attempts to condition you to not jump in whirlpools, fool. One big problem of this is that it's not a whirlpool, it's a plane, and you can't exactly just jump out of it anytime you feel like.
Then some time ago, I saw a TV program in which physicist Michio Kaku is given something out of science fiction, and told to try and describe a way to have it really happen, as best physics will allow. This particular episode was about "destroying the death star," the pivitol scene from the movie "Star Wars." His version was very different from the movie. One of the things he had to work with was G-Force, in which inertia plus a fast turn proves really, really bad for pilots. Each "G-Force" is an increase in force above what is felt due to gravity, so a pilot experiencing five g-forces is thrown with 5 times the force of earthly gravity. Air force pilots routinely suffer 7 g-forces, and astronauts experience ten. Both require elaborate systems to stay conscious by reducing the effect this has on them. Too many g-forces can prevent your brain from receiving blood, causing you to pass out, and too much more can smash your body to pulp. Dr. Kaku's solution was to immerse the pilot in water. Buoyant force counteracts the inertial force, so even as the water experiences 7, 10, or 50 g-forces, it also distributes it so that your own body doesn't feel them. He proved this with a water balloon in a centrifuge. The balloon in an air filled beaker was flattened by the force. The balloon floating in water retained its shape, no matter how fast the centrifuge went.
This makes me wonder if I flew in a tank of water, if maybe I wouldn't get motion sick. The plane could experience all the turbulence in the world and I wouldn't feel it. I'd need some sort of breathing system, as we humans don't have gills or skin-breathing the way animals that live in water do. If everyone was in tanks like that, you could not bother pressurizing the cabin, just a breathing tube in the tanks. Flying would be a more comfortable, if soggier, experience. I say this because there is a limit to cabin pressurization. The more the plane is pressurized, the harder the forces on the hull, and more than about 8.6 psi is an intolerable risk. Too much pressure and the plane simply pops like a balloon. A balloon made of metal. Not fun for anyone, but even worse for those inside it. So even with pressurization, flying in a plane is like a trip to Tibet. You have much less oxygen, and it's woozy and difficult and your sense of taste is diminished from the low pressure. In tanks, you could get a sea-level amount of air and breathe normally.
The air force would also be interested in this technology. A pilot that flew in a water-filled cockpit could turn harder and faster than one in a conventional cockpit, as he would be without the risk of blacking out. This probably makes it worth the extra weight. Especially if competing planes don't have such a system. Enemy nations would face planes that could abruptly turn around and destroy them from positions that were previously thought of as totally vulnerable. Dives could be further and faster with fewer consequences. Mobility in general would vastly improve.

Efficiency

I'd really like to increase efficiency. More work for less fuel. And less money. More for less. But you can only do so much.
Physicists have proof that there is a maximum level of efficiency possible, due to the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. Any more and you're getting a free lunch, as prohibited by the rules. You will have less than 100% efficiency, and you will have entropy, and there's just no getting around that.
For car engines, for instance, the French physicist Carnot proved about 180 years ago that the most efficient possible engine using a combustable fuel would depend on the temperature (Thanks wikipedia):

"Tc" being the temperature, expressed in the absolute "Kelvin" scale, of the cold area around the engine, and "Th" being the temperature of the exploding gasoline in the engine, again in Kelvins. Siince most of us don't operate cars in absolute zero, or even Arctic conditions, efficiency isn't very good. We're also limited by the heat tolerence of the engine. Make it too hot and it just kind of melts. Or malfunctions in some other way. You can expect maybe 20% efficiency.
Of course, one way around this is to not use a heat cycle in your engine, using some other means to generate the force. Like electricity. Electrical engines are 90% efficient. But we don't use them because we can't store it well enough. Cars use huge amounts of energy, and electrical cars as exist now have tons and tons of batteries and still have a really tiny range before the batteries are all depleted.
This gives me an idea, I'll discuss it tomorrow.

Quantum Computing

The news likes to report about Quantum computing as if it were a device that you could plug in to your wall, attach to your monitor and keyboard, and then immediately begin typing away at. This is wrong.
Quantum computing is an emerging technology that we're still working on the theoretical level. Like DNA "computers," which you can't type on, because they're a beaker full of bio-goo that they leave overnight to solve whatever problem, and then take apart the goo the next day. The goo often finds interesting solutions to complex problems, but it's not going to show up on a screen.
Similarly, existing quantum computers are series of atoms entangled in a very complicated way such as to allow researchers to "read" their properties, and "write" them by changing them. If the technology is ever commercialized, it'll be an add on card for your existing computer, not a brand new machine.
Quantum computing's main advantage is taking advantage of "superposition," in which atoms can have more than one state at the same time, but this collapses if meddled with. And atoms being small as they are, even "reading" their position collapses them. So they specialize in problems where the correct solution can be verified, but there's no better way to find it than to just guess until you get it. You basically make a superposition, guessing at every possible answer at the same time, and the superposition collapses to form the correct answer, which you then verify with traditional silicon computing.
As of this writing, the most powerful quantum computer in the world had only 7 "qubits." basically, 7 linked atoms that could have about 49 distinct states. This is nowhere near being able to do any sort of practical thing, but you have to crawl before you can walk. They're working on one with 9 qubits, but to do anything practical, you'd need at least a hundred, and preferably a thousand.
Also, we'd have to have some way of reliably electronically "reading" and "writing" the atoms. Your quantum computer isn't going to be very valuable to you if you have to hire a quantum physicist just to learn what the results even are.

Active sound cancelation system

Physicists have long been aware that when it comes to sound, inverse-waves cancel each other. -1 + 1 = 0. This has been applied to some fancy pairs of headphones that listen to outside sounds, and emit a reversed version in the speaker near your ear, with the result that you hear nothing. Useful in noisy places where one may wish to concentrate, or sleep. (Like an airplane.) But let me come up with another, more appreciative, use for this technology.
Many people love listening to really really loud music. It's bad for them, and the reason why one quarter the people my age or older have massive hearing loss. It also annoys everyone around them, who have to listen to their bass-lines for hours and hours and hours. I can't do anything about the deafening besides turning down the music, and they'd just turn it back up again. But I can use this technology to make their neighbours less annoyed.
Experimentation will result in a stereo system that has some speakers outside. Why? Inverse signal. You can turn the knob to 11 and your neighbours will hear nothing. It can do that because the sound is a known quantity (it does have access to the original signal), and the muffling that the walls and floor and ceiling makes are also known quantities. It can produce an exact reverse of what would be audible outside, thereby canceling it. The house is now perfectly quiet on the outside. Very loud on the inside, where your favorite music blares.
In fact, if you have very thick, sturdy floors, you could throw a party without your neighbors noticing at all. You'd be as quiet as it would be on an isolated estate, just the way your neighbours like it. (Warning: Will not protect against footsteps. That's why you need a thick floor.)

Optical Computer

A computer really is a marvel of electromagnetic engineering, using electromagnetism to handle every single aspect of it. The control signals are electric. The short term storage is an electric pattern in the RAM. The long term storage is a magnetic pattern on the hard drive. (Or a floppy, or, very rarely now, a pattern blown into a Flash ROM.) Power comes from readily available electric sockets, and portable computers can operate for a few hours on battery, and can be charged reasonably quickly.
However, there are places where electrical computers work poorly, like in high magnetic or radiation areas. Strong magnetic fields can "flip" bits from one to zero or back, distorting and corrupting the information until the computer can no longer function. Similarly, ionizing radiation wrecks hell upon computers, even when they're off. (The radiation causes electric currents to flow, self powering, and often overwhelming the circuitry.)
However, it would still be possible to operate a computer there if need be, because electromagnetism is not the only force able to send a control signal, as we learned when laying undersea cables, which tended to attenuate when electricity flowed through them, reducing the signal quality. The substitute force was optic fiber. Signals would be sent by light.
Similarly, a computer could be made that had optical channels, that flipped around physical storage mediums when the light shined upon them. The computer would have fiber optic channels instead of copper wires, mirrored gates that could be moved into one of two positions, laser emitters to produce the light, and sensors to detect it. It would still take electric power, but the signals would be stored in light, and transmitted via fiber optic cables for permenant storage away from the danger zone. In a strong magnetic field....it gets free power and the signals aren't affected. In a radiation zone....it gets free power and the signals aren't affected.
This could be useful in medicine, for deep scanners that work via powerful magnets, for radiation-recovery robots, who can be effectively infinitely hardened against radiation, and for deep space, where radiation is a constant threat.
There is a downside too: the optical computer would be bigger and more expensive, and likely slower at first. It would be like downgrading to a 386, which would be painful in this six-core world.

Carbon Nozzle

Carbon sequestering is tricky business. As carbon dioxide, it has a tendency to mix with all the other air, making it incredibly hard to keep under control. Keeping it capped is an expensive proposition. Not anymore, says Discovery news.
Carbon dioxide sublimates far earlier than nitrogen or oxygen liquefies, temperature wise. So just chilling out emissions separates the carbon, which can be quickly buried before it evaporates again. A refrigerator would be too expensive, though. The new method is to use rockets to cool the emissions, shoot off the nitrogen, oxygen, and other useful gasses, and then grab the dry ice before the next batch arrives.
The company that invented this technique estimates that this will reduce the cost of sequestering to a little less than half it's current costs, which responsible businesses should approve of.