popular science

Every year at Japan's Ceatec exhibition, Murata Manufacturing, a Kyoto-based component maker, manages to put on a show that rivals the big-name electronics companies such as Sony and Panasonic.

Here at GeekTech, we've seen lots of contraptions to help the disabled regain some of their mobility. Now, a group of Swiss scientists from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have found a way to rewire the spinal cord of rats after a paralyzing injury.

Even though we’re still waiting for flying cars, we’re already living in the future predicted by science fiction. Here are a few tech prophecies from sci-fi films, books, and TV shows that became reality.

In the future, even the trees will be keeping tabs on us. Seven years of government-funded research to develop alternate avenues of national defense have finally borne fruit in the form of "plant sentinels," color-changing, chemical-sniffing shrubbery created by Colorado State University biologist June Medford and her crack team of chemical researchers. According to a recent article in the Denver Post, the CSU team has modified common plants to change color in the presence of potentially hazardous chemicals like drugs, pollutants or even explosives.

Tracking the objects in orbit around the Earth is an important task, whether you're calculating and preventing collisions, or safely launching shuttles and other objects into space.

University of Utah psychologists have labeled those few – just 2.5% of the population – who can drive safely while yapping on a hands-free cellphone as "supertaskers."

No beans about it: An automobile dubbed the "Car-puccino" has been designed to run only on leftover coffee grinds. The heavily-modified 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco was created for British TV show Bang Goes The Theory, a program that's all about "putting science to the test." To prove that just about anything can be turned into car fuel these days, Bang Goes The Theory will drive the Car-puccino 210 miles from London to Manchester using only residual coffee grounds as fuel.

No longer a subject of science fiction, a car that can fly like a regular airplane, but then land, fold up its wings and drive away debuted in Boston Wednesday.