When Fiction Becomes Reality

radarrider found this article on liquid armor, straight out of Snow Crash (as he points out).  This stuff could have a hell of a lot of non-military applications too -- picture a layer of liquid armor in your motorcycle riding gear.

From another fictional genre, how about Star Trek : Enterprise's hand-held translators?  US troops are using them in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The device gets better accuracy than previous computerized speech translators by translating entire phrases at a time instead of individual words, and does not need to be trained for the speaker's voice.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Missouri-Rolla are making engines smarter, cleaner and more economical by giving them neural networks.  This sounds somewhat saner, frankly, than the Ricardo/Ford project to build a supercharged engine that sitches on the fly between 2-stroke and 4-stroke operation.  I have to wonder if they're outsmarting themselves on this one.

And finally, there's the Swedish company that's building wooden computers.  No, I'm serious.