After working his way through the South, Dave talks with innovators of the automotive industry in Phoenix and Los Angeles. Keep up-to-date with all of the adventures on Route 77 by following @DaveSeliger on Twitter!

Day 13

The newest generation of the Rally Fighter

I was very excited to find out that Local Motors, a crowd-sourced car company, was based out of Phoenix, AZ—right in the middle of my four days driving through the desert. Local Motors released the first generation of the Rally Fighter in 2010 and is now rolling out the second generation. The company has also hosted design competitions for a variety of clients, including DARPA and Peterbilt. However, Local Motors faces stiff criticism that the company is effectively lowering the value of designers through their design competitions. I sat down with Local Motors' Adam Keiser and Alex Fiechter to learn how the company is attempting to disrupt the auto manufacturing industry through crowd-sourced design, as well as increase the value of designers along the way.

Local Motors' Adam Keiser

Local Motors' microfactory

Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers initially came up with the concept for a community-driven (no pun intended) car design company while a student at the Harvard Business School. The point behind having a community—called the Forge—design a car is to have them design the car they would want to buy and then make that car a reality. In this way, Local Motors has an established niche market before the car is even produced. This is in stark contrast to the current paradigm of auto manufacturing. "You can't walk into Ford or GM and say, 'I want a car exactly how I want it designed,'" said Keiser. Moreover, Local Motors is set-up to have an extremely quick turnaround from initial sketches to a working prototype; in the case of the Rally Fighter, this timeline was only 18 months.

The first generation of the Rally Fighter

The prototype Rally Fighter

At the very foundation of this business model, though, is having a dedicated community of designers and engineers that will design whatever this car is. Fiechter argued that the compensation for the winning designer is more than fair. In the case of the Rally Fighter, winner Sangho Kim received an initial reward of $7,500, and then another $10,000 when Local Motors started to develop the car. The implicit understanding is that the prize money is representative of Local Motors purchasing the designer's IP. Given that each competition only lasts for 3 to 4 weeks, and that a majority of competitors are students or recent graduates, "that's pretty significant compensation for that amount of time," said Feichter.

Ride along after the jump...

The Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, founder and one-third of KiBiSi, now lives for much of the year in New York City and has an observation of his home-away-from-home: "It is the most insanely noisy city."

Ingels has likely had sound on his mind a lot lately, as KiBiSi's new Capital headphones for AIAIAI have just hit the market. Designed for the on-the-go urbanite, the Capital headphones are durable, foldable, flexible, and even weatherproof, "tested to withstand rain, snow and hail," the way the U.S. Postal Service used to be. Check out the features in this video animation:

Coinciding with the debut of the product, KiBiSi has also released this video of Ingels and co-KiBiSi'er Lars Larsen chewing the design fat. The vid's got the best of both worlds—Ingels discussing design philosophy in a relatable way that doesn't veer too far into abstraction, followed by Larsen discussing the nuts-and-bolts design of the product:

In my experience, Australians seem to travel in packs of two or more. Each time I've met an Australian, one, two or more of their countrymen are close by. At Dwell on Design this past weekend, I met six in one booth.

The six form Quench, a collective of designers from Queensland, Australia, who all smartly pool their resources, whether they're sharing manufacturers, or studios, or a tradeshow booth at Dwell. Each represented himself individually, but all together (with their space) confirmed another Australian stereotype of mine: they are fun, engaging, and colorful.

Luxx Box's Watch Out

David Shaw's Flow

There was David Shaw's "Flow" planter, a divider/bench/planter nicely done in white and grey powder-coated steel. Flow is representative of Shaw's public works design, for his studio Street and Garden Furniture Co. He creates bus benches, bike racks, drinking fountains, etc., with a clean yet classic sensibility greatly needed in public works design (at least in the U.S.).

Luxx Box's Milk and Tingle

Alexander Lotersztain, with his studio Derlot Editions, and Jason Bird's Luxx Box brought the playful color to the Quench booth. Derlot had "Picket," a lovely table with a solid Tasmanian oak top and brightly colored, powder-coated steel legs. The legs are an appealingly chunky, rounded-tube shape. Luxx Box brought the most color, showing a range of colors in the Milk stool, recyclable polyethylene Tingle seat, and Watch Out, a colorful take on the old industrial sconce.

Derlot's Picket

We love seeing meaningful projects reach their Kickstarter funding goals, and we really love it when those projects involve innovative, high performance technology—like Radian, a motion time-lapse device and smartphone app aimed at bringing pricey photography equipment to a wider audience. Normally a remote timer alone costs around $130, but Radian is set to sell for just $125. As a completely self-contained product you don't even need a tripod, let alone the cabling. That's partially because Radian's inventors have streamlined the manufacturing process, but also because if you use an iPhone or Android you already own the remote timer, no tethering required.

The device itself is a traditional tripod mount (though it also works alone on a tabletop), but the real genius here is in the app. The easy-to-use interface allows you to program tilt direction and speed; The app will even automatically change the exposure so you can shoot seamlessly from sunrise to sunset. And not only can you exit the app during the time-lapse, you can even turn your phone off without interrupting the process.

"To make things even simpler, our app makes valuable real time calculations - giving you a good feel for what the resulting time-lapse would be based on your settings. This allows you to quickly and easily adjust your settings to get your desired output while simultaneously saving you multiple trips to the calculator app.We have integrated bramping (bulb-ramping for smooth night-day-night transitions, currently only for Canon cameras), speed ramping, and a range of time-delay settings. Our app combined with Radian allows you to take on previously difficult feats, such as day-to-night and sunrise-to-sunset time-lapses."

A month after the winner of HEINEKEN's first innovation challenge—focused on Sustainability—was announced, the HEINEKEN Ideas Brewery is churning again with their next great design challenge: Reinvent the Draught Beer Experience.

As any red-blooded beer drinker can tell you, there's something special and refreshing about draught beer. HEINEKEN reinvented the category in 2005 when they introduced the DraughtKeg, a portable draught beer system that was a feat of engineering and design. Fast-forward to today's Ideas Brewery Challenge and designers have an opportunity to take inspiration from new technological advances in music, entertainment, UX and product design and implement these ideas into a full-service on-premise Draught Beer Experience.

The Ideas Brewery asks designers to take into account the following areas as hotspots for innovation:

Remember the huge CNC we showed you in June? That one was made for milling out enormous wooden molds; but Behrokh Khoshnevis is working on a gargantuan 3D printer that can print out entire houses.

Khoshnevis is a professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California, and his system, Contour Crafting, calls for a moveable gantry whose rails are riding on ground presumably leveled the old-fashioned way, by a construction crew. Concrete houses can then be built up layer by layer, just like on a MakerBot, with spaces left empty to have plumbing and electrical modules inserted within them.

The original idea was to come up with a quick, inexpensive method of construction for disaster relief, but it's easy to see how this could translate to first-world communities. The huge advantage of 3D-printing a house is that you no longer need hew to rectilinear construction methods. Our houses and apartment buildings are largely right angles because they're made out of dimensional lumber, Glulam beams, bricks, cinder blocks, I-beams, et cetera; but as Khoshnevis points out in his TED talk, below, with 3D printing you can take advantage of complex—and beautiful—geometry.

There are a couple more surprises in the video about how this system would be both faster than traditional construction and produce less waste, but I won't spoil them for you. (Check out the wall's serpentine interior construction, though.)

Sr. Interaction Designer - Life and Material Sciences
Autodesk
San Francisco, California

Autodesk is seeking a Sr. Interaction Designer for their new and growing Life & Material Sciences team. The successful candidate will be a senior interaction designer with several years of experience in large software development. He or she has strong problem solving abilities and a user centric perspective, with experience in storyboarding workflows and prototyping. The designer must be comfortable designing in new and ambiguous scenarios.

» view
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

"Historically, leaders in the worlds of materials and design have each led separate lives," says global chemicals company Eastman. "While engineers, chemists, and product designers have all made exciting and innovative advances, they have largely progressed independently of each other." To change that up, Eastman teamed up with Oregon-based design consultancy Ziba in a self-initiated Materials Design Challenge. One result is the flask you see above, called TOPO, which combines Eastman's Tritan copolyester material with Ziba's design skills.

The "Gentleman's Flask" is not tied to a specific product or brand, but is meant to be a demonstration of what the pairing can achieve. The Tritan material can be molded with a much more widely variable wall thickness (going from very thin to very thick) than plastic or glass, and this is made obvious to the viewer by the topographical relief embedded within the surface. An integrated funnel in the neck smoothens both the filling and pouring of liquids, and Tritan's ability to take a clean ultrasonic weld ensures watertightness. The top portion of the flask is frosted while the rest is glass-clear, demonstrating the variability of textures possible. Lastly, the durable flask is dishwasher friendly.

"By exploring material properties and design possibilities concurrently," explains Eastman's Dave Porter, "we were able to explore a wide range of ideas and develop a showcase product that would not have been realized by the processes typically used by Ziba or Eastman."

The flask will be on display at the upcoming IDSA conference in Boston (Ed Note: Monday, August 6th is the LAST day to register); look for it at the breakfast event on the 16th.

Reporting by Tony Ho Loke

Say the words "travel wallet" and one of the the last words that would come to your mind as a description is "compact." Travel wallets are meant to be the one place where you keep all your important travel documents and on a long haul journey, that can mean anything from passports to airplane boarding passes to that 3 page print out of your itinerary. In this situation, what you need is space and that's not a quality to apply the less is more concept.

Bellroy, an Australian bag company is attempting to do just this with a compact, billfold version of a carry all wallet. I had a chance to take it on the road for a weekend cross country trip to the left coast and knock it around.

The first thing you'll notice is that "compact" is a relative term. As men's wallets get smaller and smaller to accommodate a few bank cards and bills, the Bellroy Travel Wallet in comparison looks positively Mastodonian:

But the dimensions of the wallet was built around a standard passport, which slips right into a pocket when you flip the thing open:

A good design call on this feature, most customs and immigrations folks want you to hand over your papers unencumbered by a fancy case. And if you're paranoid about losing things like me and pat yourself down at least three times a day to make sure you didn't forget something, having your passport front and center means less time freaking out.

The billfold area is divided into two sections—one for money and the other for other travel documents—tickets, receipts, folding up pieces of paper. The size was just right for my boarding passes and it was good to have everything airport security people want to check in one place:

New York residents are generally pretty savvy about waste management companies' rules for putting out recycling—glass and plastics in transparent bags, newspaper and cardboard bundled—and I remember seeing (somewhat baffling) rows of recycling bins in Tokyo, but it requires diligence on a broad scale. Hence, statistics such as: "The average Dane generates about 624 kg of waste per year [but only] 12% of the daily waste is recycled."

Cause for concern though this may be, the situation also presents an opportunity. Denmark's largest waste mangement company Vestforbrænding is partnering with Join.dk to hold an international design competition to motivate Danes to "Sort Your Trash Can."

The brief? To create a "version of a user-friendly sorting-can that fits the private Danish household." Entries will be judged on five criteria: behavior change, design communication, flexibility, context and functionality.

...citizens are not just citizens. They are a collection of very diverse people with different needs. There are large families and small families, single people, older people and some with special needs. Some people need big bins, others need small bins. Some citizens would like to have their garbage cans out of sight, while others want to flash their environmental awareness. Some want their trash out by the garage, others want it right outside the kitchen window.

But there's a twist, of sorts: the community is encouraged to comment, tossing out ideas for a chance to win additional prizes such as an iPad 3.

The ideal process is to upload a brainstorm sketch of your initial thoughts as early as possible, while end users, Vestforbænding and everybody else on Join.dk can give suggestions for improvements of your idea. If lots of people like and comment on your design or idea and you also implement modifications, your design will get more positive attention.

Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2012! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

The NuBone Supplements Packaging is designed with the user experience in mind to improve the visual and data communication between the consumer, product and its users. The new fitted packaging is plastic free, recyclable, and enriches the product selection process.

How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
We learn that we had been awarded the prize by the jury while we were watching the live-broadcast on the announcement day.

What's the latest news or development with your project?
Our project, NuBone, in addition to the Core77 Design Award it has also been recognized by the Dieline Packaging Competition as a Best Packaging Award under Pet category. We are currently looking for partners to incorporate the winning package design for dog nutrition products in the market.

What is one quick anecdote about your project?
We had done numerous consumer validation tests as part of the design process. During the tests, we had noticed that consumers tend to gravitate toward our package first among the many product on the shelves. The result of these observations strongly convinced us of NuBone's potential to improve user-product interaction.

What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
We were both surprised by the low value that the packaging of dog nutritional bones were perceived among other pet products. We realized that there would be a huge potential to improve, and increase its value through the design of its packaging.We wanted the bone to speak for itself of its ingredients and flavors. Intrigued by the bone's relationship with its source, we have put together visually the bone alongside of the raw ingredients (i.e. in meats, poultry, and fish), and then everything just clicked for us. The meat and the drumstick were extremely communicated our message seamlessly. We then applied the same concept to rest of the flavors.

Photos by Richard Barnes for the New York Times

Seeing as Gothamist is one of New York City's premier digital media outlets, Hipstomp didn't exactly have to dig up Jake Dobkin's photos of the new 7 Train Extension, though I was duly impressed with the follow-up post on Tunnel Boring Machines (like many of the commenters, I could spend hours checking out boring photos and videos).

The Paper of Record has recently taken an interest, plunging some 80 feet below Midtown Manhattan to unearth both the logistical and human side of the story of the Second Avenue Subway, with photos by Richard Barnes. Along with the video, it's a bit more subterranean transit porn for those of us who give a schist.

"Geology defines the way you drive the tunnel," [Engineering Manager Amitabha] Mukherjee said. The bedrock below Second Avenue and for much of the rest of Manhattan is schist—a hard, gray black rock shot through with sheets of glittery mica. Some 500 million years ago, Manhattan was a continental coastline that collided with a group of volcanic islands known as the Taconic arc. That crash crumpled layers of mud, sand and lava into schist, lending it an inconsistent structure and complicating tunneling: in some places, the schist holds firmly together, creating self-supporting arches; in others, it's broken and prone to shattering, forcing workers to reinforce the tunnel as they go to keep it from falling.

The first time New York confronted its bedrock to build a subway, in 1900, the method was "cut and cover": nearly 8,000 laborers given to gambling, fighting and swearing were hired to pickax and dynamite their way through streets and utility lines for two miles. Their efforts were quick—they finished in four years—but their blasts smashed windows and terrorized carriage horses. Tunnels collapsed, killing workers and swallowing storefronts.

The felicitously parallel universe of a certain concurrent blockbuster notwithstanding, the images offer a look at a work-in-progress on a prodigious—yet largely unseen—scale. The first two-mile span of the once-fabled Second Avenue Subway, from 63rd St to 96th, is set to open in December 2016 (the earlier set of photos was from the less ambitious crosstown line, which will mark the westernmost terminal of the subway system when it opens in 2014/2015). Insofar as the new track is scheduled to open in four score and seven years since the original proposal (in the flush-then-very-lean times of 1929), the MTA's ongoing budget woes have been the real bane of workaday Gothamites.

Don't miss the video after the jump...

Paddy Donnelly designed poster, a backers gift for Kickstarting the 3rd Season of 99% Invisible. An ode to the audio cassette and a time when a pencil could solve all of our problems.

One of the coolest things about visiting a design studio and shadowing a designer is seeing their work in action. It's amazing to see a design come to life, and to watch designers ask and answer all the questions that designers do. That's also the beauty of solid design writing and journalism—the best writers are storytellers who find the tidbits that make design such a compelling field.

"I felt there was a real way to tell these stories in a cool way. And you can tell that the awareness of different aspects of design is at an all time high," said Roman Mars, the producer, host and founder of 99% Invisible, a popular radio show about design. As a host for Public Radio Exchange, Mars brought his public radio experience to the design show and met with numerous designers and architects to refine the concept.

99% Invisible host Roman Mars.

Everyone he spoke with mentioned a quote from legendary designer and innovator Buckminster Fuller, who talked about the "99% invisible" forces that shape the world and with this inspiration, the show was born. What started as a 1 minute spot soon evolved into a 4 1/2 minute radio show with even longer episodes for the popular podcast.

While it might seem difficult to talk about such visual work in an aural medium, Mars has a knack for finding the remarkable in daily life. And it's by identifying the compelling stories behind design that his program shines. In one popular episode, "Frozen Music," he talks about just how radical it was record music:

But no effect has been as world changing as that original innovation: freezing music in time onto a recording, where a single version of a song, a single performance of a song, became the song. An inherently mutable method of communication was fundamentally changed.

"That's sort of my favorite part," Mars explained, "a little factoid about something that makes you see that thing differently and that makes you appreciate it and find some kind of genius or wonder in everyday things. I tend not to cover amazing or innovative design that makes you ooh and aah."

"I kind of like to cover manhole covers," he continued. "That's more my beat."

Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2012! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

This concept re-defines the relationship between passengers in a vehicle and the world around it by transforming the vehicle's windows into an interactive interface. The concepts generated in this project aimed to re-define human-nature relationship in the context of near future mobility, expose Europeans to Japanese values and culture and use this experience to trigger emotions.

How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
The project team discovered that we had won the Speculative Design category by watching the online stream on the Core77 website. CIID is very international and we were scattered across various computers and countries. The Toyota team were in Brussels and Japan. One CIID team member was in Spain, two were in Italy, and the rest of us were gathered around a computer in the CIID Consulting office in Copenhagen. We were continuously refreshing the twitter stream and our eyes were glued to Bruce Sterling as he announced the results. When we heard the words "Window To The World", our screams travelled throughout the building!! Our colleagues could hear us two floors above - so they knew without asking that we had won!

What's the latest news or development with your project?
Since developing Window To The World, CIID Consulting has continued to have a successful on-going collaboration with Toyota. The vision of Window To The World has proven to captivate many audiences both on and offline. The video has had well over a million views, it has been featured on CNN, and published in many newspapers including The Independent (UK) and The Chicago Tribune. A working prototype of the Window To The World interface is now exhibited in the Toyota Flagship store on the Champs Elysee in Paris. Winning a Core77 design award is a great honor to add to these achievements and we look forward to further successful collaborations between CIID and Toyota in the coming months.

What is one quick anecdote about your project?
The original storyboard for the Window To The World video was set in beautiful countryside, with rolling hills and the sun shining in the background. However, we soon realised we were in Denmark (one of the flattest countries on the planet), it was winter, there was no sun and only a few hours of light a day! Not to be put off by such trivial matters, we went ahead as planned, fueled with enthusiasm - just with a lot of scarves on!

What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
The 'a ha' moment for this project was when we built the first working prototype of the Window To The World interface using rear projection, IR technology and some code. The physical prototype itself was by no means beautiful but the experience it promoted was. By using these quick prototyping methods we were instantly able to test the idea with people in order for us to get feedback and refine the overall vision. It was an amazing experience to see people engaging with the idea and enjoying the interaction - and it was interesting for us to understand the different behaviours it promoted. What was initially a simple sketch and paper scenario of an idea, was brought to life in the real world where people could experience it for themselves.

Two-year-old Emma was born with anthrogryposis (AMC), a rare congenital disease that affects muscle strength. At a family conference, Emma's mother learned about the Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton (WREX), an assistive device made of hinged metal bars and resistance bands that enables people with underdeveloped arms to play and feed themselves.

Tariq Rahman and Whitney Sample of the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children had created an early prototype of the WREX, that worked for children as young as six. But the device was attached to a wheelchair and some children with AMC, including Emma, had use of their legs. The early version of the WREX was just too large and heavy for a child of Emma's size.

Rahman and Sample found that, with the use of 3D printers, they were able to create a lightweight and flexible working prosthetic for Emma, that is customizable with easily replicated broken parts. The custom exoskeletons are printed in ABS plastic and attached to a plastic vest. Because of the ease of manufacturing, the exoskeleton can grow with the child which makes 3D printing especially exciting for those working in pediatric care.

Currently, fifteen children now use a custom 3D printed WREX device. Watch the full video of Emma's story after the jump.

Disney's iconic "Prototype Community" inspired a series of poster compositions by Stephen Christ of Morton Grove, IL, who is releasing the complete set of 11 posters on Kickstarter in anticipation of the theme park's 30th anniversary this October. The artist, an industrial designer by trade, originally created the self-initiated homage a couple years back, but he's just launched a modest Kickstarter campaign (he's made $1,500 towards his $5,000 goal) in order to share his work with a broader audience, with the "ultimate goal to be accepted into Disney's Festival of Masters that showcases the best Disney artists around the world."

October 1, 1982 - This was the day EPCOT Center opened its doors at Walt Disney World in Florida. Originally planned as an entire futuristic city, this innovative theme park was a gamble. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before. It was a display of everything the natural world has to offer, everything humans are capable of, and what the future holds. It was also one of the most well-designed and interesting places on earth.

One of my favorite parts of EPCOT Center was the logos that designated each pavilion. They were as basic as could be, stripping down a broad idea into a simple symbol. I wanted to celebrate this, so I expanded each logo into a fully fleshed out work of art. A simple line art drawing turned into a full color poster.

The flattened, color-block aesthetic hearkens back to Constructivism, while the vector icons evoke the much more recent Noun Project. Faux-distressing notwithstanding, the wonderful artwork transcends mere modernist nostalgia, capturing the optimistic spirit of its subject matter.

Fort Standard's Balancing Blocks are a perennial favorite in the NYC's ever-growing pop-up design store scene (including the Herman Miller co-sign): the faceted oblong blocks are jewel-like yet abstract a modernist take on nostalgia for play. The polychromatic polyhedra aptly encapsulate the Brooklyn duo's minimalist approach to form and materials.

The clever promo video gives new meaning to 'block party':

The painted oak blocks, which are sold in sets of ten, are also available year-'round through Areaware (though they're currently out of stock til October).

Wrapping up our second year, the Core77 Design Awards is proud to honor over 200 award-winning design innovations from around the world. Representing 17 categories of design enterprise, the Core77 Design Awards celebrates the richness of the design profession and the brilliance of its practitioners by encouraging designers, researchers and writers a unique opportunity to communicate the intent, rigor and passion behind their efforts.

A truly global effort, the Core77 Design Awards would not be possible without the insight and participation of our international juries. Representing 13 cities in 8 countries, the results of the 2012 Awards program encompass the perspectives of 74 outstanding jury members who shared their thoughts, directly with you, in our live jury announcements. From Paris to Pretoria, Chicago to Changsha, the Core77 Design Awards is truly a current reflection on the global state of design.

For a quick look at this year's program, we have a full gallery of the 2012 awardees. For more in-depth analysis, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

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The USB seems to have grown exponentially more prevalent since it evolved into its third and current revision in late 2008 as the standard connector and, in concert with the decreasing cost of flash memory, replacing optical media as well. A couple of new products—one enthusiastically crowdfunded, the other not quite as successful (as of press time)—affirm USB technology's place among those coveted objects of 'everyday carry.'

Our beloved smartphones only obliquely acknowledge their dependence on Universal Serial Bus: they're one degree (read: cable) removed from port... which, as Zeller Designs sees it, is precisely the problem. The ChargeCard, created by Noah Dentzel and Adam Miller, is at least as clever as its name: an iDevice (or micro-USB) cable in card form. The 1/10”-inch form factor makes it a readily 'walletable' solution to unwieldly, dubiously portable cables. As the story goes, the L.A.-based team came up with the ChargeCard when "one of Noah's colleague's desperately paid 50 bucks to a guy at a bar in exchange for his charger so he could text a girl he was trying to meet up with."

They upped the ante, seeking $50,000 on Kickstarter, a goal that they've more than doubled with 24 days to go.

Meanwhile, in keeping with Dentzel and Miller's dude-centric mantra of "keys, phone, wallet," another self-initiated product speaks to the widespread adoption of USB technology. Considering that flash drives are now as common a keychain talisman as the ever-popular bottle opener—after all, the current generation of young urban professionals includes a contingent of former fratboys—it was only a matter of time before the two tools were combined into one. Designer Carter James is hoping to launch the PopTop USB Drive via IndieGogo, with just under three weeks to reach his $5,500 goal.

While most USB drives are made from cheap plastic that are lucky to survive a week on your keychain, the PopTop USB drive departs from that trend. Made out of a solid cast alloy, it feels solid in your hand and will probably outlast anything else you keep in your pockets. It integrates a bottle opener into the end as well which means simplifying your keychain with one item. At 16GB, you can pretty much store anything you need.

That ID school project where you have to drop an egg off a building in a cardboard structure? NASA engineers could do that in their sleep. Last night many of us were glued to thrilling online coverage of the Curiosity Rover's successful landing on Mars, which brought with it an insane challenge: How do you get a one-ton car, which is traveling 13,000 miles per hour in orbit, safely down to the surface?

Previous Mars Rovers were small and could be crash-landed within a bubble of airbags, which wouldn't work for the 2,000-pound Curiosity. So NASA's eggheads came up with the following plan, which sounds like something you get fired for suggesting: As the capsule containing the payload enters the atmosphere, thrusters pilot it towards the target landing site while heat shielding prevents it from burning up. Next a parachute deploys to slow the craft down. Then the rover, concealed within a sort of rocket platform, drops away from the capsule. The rocket platform fires up its onboard jets, going into a slow, controlled descent. Then, while hovering over the surface, the rocket platform lowers the Rover to the ground on cables.

NASA informally refers to the procedure as the "Seven Minutes of Terror." A sequence of 79 events all have to be perfectly executed in order for this to work. Mars is some 150-million-plus miles away from Earth, resulting in a worse-than-Skype fourteen-minute communication lag, so it's not like some hyper-caffeinated jockey with a joystick can make last-minute corrections. If one little thing goes wrong, that's $2.6 billion down the drain.

But yeah, they pulled it off. This NASA animation of the landing plan is your must-see video of the week: