In 2012, robotic technology made some huge leaps forward. We put the world's most sophisticated planetary rover on Mars using a daring--and precise--robotic delivery system. We launched marine robots capable of taking on hurricanes and rebuilding damaged coral reefs. We saw four-legged robots set new land speed records, and winged, autonomous robots strut their potentially lethal stuff on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

We see this kind of improvement in robotic capabilities each year--indicative of just how much momentum the robotics revolution has gained in the opening stretch of the 21st century. Click through the gallery below to take a spin through the past year in robotics--which you can also think of as a spin through the future.

Click to launch the photo gallery

MATERIALS
Paper
Pencil
Scissors
Glue
Alka-Seltzer tablets
Water
Empty film canister

STEP 1
Design your rocket, drawing it on paper. A simple cylinder, nose cone, and a pair of fins will suffice. It should stand around 6 inches (15 cm) tall and be approximately 1½ inches (3.75 cm) in diameter.

STEP 2
Cut out your rocket components (cylinder, nose cone, and fins) and glue them together.

STEP 3
Open the film canister and drop one-half of an Alka-Seltzer tablet into it.

STEP 4
Fill the canister half full of water and snap the canister cap into place. Slide the rocket over the cap, place the assembly cap-down, and get back. Watch the rocket blast off.

This project was excerpted from The Big Book Of Hacks: 264 Amazing DIY Tech Projects, a compendium of ingenious and hilarious projects for aspiring makers. Buy it here. And for more amazing hacks, go here.

Science and technology have utterly transformed human life in the past few generations, and forecasts of the future used to be measured in decades. But big changes arrive faster and faster these days. So here we've shifted our forecast to the near-term, because we're right on the verge of some extraordinary stuff. These are the trends and events to watch out for in 2013. See them all here.

On April 5, 2012, President Barack Obama sat at a small, wooden desk in the White House Rose Garden and signed the JOBS Act, one of the most transformative pieces of securities legislation written since the Great Depression. Among the 22 pages of dense legalese, one section stood out: the Crowdfund Act. Pending the creation of SEC regulations later this year, new businesses will be able to make their own IPOs, and small investors could act as venture capitalists.

Start-ups and inventors raised an estimated $2.8 billion on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter in 2012, a 529 percent increase from 2009. But they could only solicit donations, presales of products, and loans. By allowing equity investment, lawmakers expect to supercharge crowdfunding, which would make nascent businesses less reliant on angel investors and banks while spurring innovation across a wider range of companies.

There are, of course, pitfalls. More than half of all start-ups fail within 10 years. "It's not clear yet whether the wisdom of the crowds will hold for picking successful businesses," says Josh Lerner, a professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School. Investor losses could lead to big disappointments, litigation, or, worse, allegations of fraud, says Bryan Sullivan, a lawyer in California. "My mother is a secretary," he says. "My father is a construction worker. Those are the kind of people who would throw $5,000 in and think they can make $100,000. What happens when it fails?"

The crowdsourced-equity model is not untested, however. The Australian Small Scale Offerings Board has transferred about $130 million to start-ups since 2007 with little reported fraud. Plus, the Crowdfund Act helps protect investors: Those who make less than $100,000 can commit only $2,000 or 5 percent of their annual income, whichever is greater. The act also requires company disclosures, so investors can do their due diligence. Once the SEC sets the ground rules, anyone who backs a great idea will stand to profit. But the biggest benefit will likely be to innovation itself.

In the startup zone at CES, known as Eureka Park, prototype devices were in no short supply. One we wish would hurry on to the market is a miniature, wearable thermoelectric generator. The company responsible, Perpetua Power, gave us a closer look at the dime-sized TEG and a couple prototype devices.

In November, MIT grad student Dhairya Dand blacked out at a party and woke up in the hospital. Some people might use that as a wake-up call to lay off the tequila shots for a few weekends, but Dand, an engineer and former educational toy designer, did one better. Three weeks later, he had created a set of glowing ice cubes called Cheers that let you know when you're going too hard.

A circuit enmeshed in an edible jelly mold monitors the number of sips taken, using an accelerometer that tracks the drink's motion, and calculates how drunk you are based on a timer. Using three cubes with different LED lights, your drink changes color from green to orange to red, letting you know when you should take it easy.

The lights in the ice cubes pulse along with the music. because hey, drinking is supposed to be fun. But if you ignore the warnings and keep drinking when the cubes are telling you to slow down, an IR transceiver allows them to send a text to a close friend letting someone know you're in trouble. An app lets you designate who your emergency contacts are.

Marketing the product wasn't his original intent, but after receiving such a positive response, Dand told The Huffington Post he's considering a Kickstarter campaign to make more of the cubes. Check them out in the video below.

Cheers - alcohol-aware glowing ice-cubes that beat to ambient music from Dhairya Dand on Vimeo.

Continuing Australia's trend of being majorly unpleasant this week, it got so hot in the Outback town of Oodnadatta a few days ago that you couldn't even pump gas.

On Monday, temperatures in the town reached 48.2 degrees Celsius (118.76 degrees Fahrenheit), and drivers who stopped for gas were stymied when unleaded fuel became unavailable because it was vaporizing in the heat.

Oodnadatta already has a claim on hot weather in Australia. It holds the country's all-time heat record from from January 1960, of 50.7 degrees Celsius. This week broke Oodnadatta's record for most consecutive days with temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius, with seven days of intense heat, and today temperatures are set to climb to 47 degrees Celsius.

This leaves the town in a though spot, since gasoline can't be pumped temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius, lest it vaporize. According to The Age, the average maximum January temperature in the area has gone up 0.9 degrees in the past 30 years, to 38.4 degrees Celsius. The owner of a local roadhouse described the recent weather as "like a wall of fire."

Not being able to fuel up isn't the only thing travelers have to worry about, either, since some tar roads have also melted. Yikes.

[News.com.au]

We let you in on our favorite gadgets from CES 2013, and now our friends over at Pop Photo have made their picks for best camera gear of the show. It's full of amazing cameras and awesome accessories, like a super-tough filter. Take a look at the near-future of photography. [Pop Photo]

Poop slinging isn't just for monkeys anymore -- in this day and age, you can also pay a doctor to do it. Fecal transplants, which have been around since at least 1958, aim to correct an upset in the normal bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract by introducing someone else's waste into it, in the hopes that it will restore the balance of microbes necessary for normal digestion. With a 90 percent success rate, it's gross, but effective.

The process is much how you would imagine it -- a small amount of donor feces are inserted into the intestines during a colonoscopy or with an enema. The latest discovery in the realm of medical poop treatments may make the procedure less icky: Researchers are developing a synthetic version.

Normally, when feces from a healthy person are inserted into a sick person's large intestine, there's a risk that the donor may transmit an infection along with their healthy bacteria, or that the patient's body won't accept the transmission. There's also the fact that the sample needs to be "fresh." Plus, of course, the fact that people tend to balk at putting someone else's feces inside their body.

But now scientists have found away to circumvent those complications: fake poop. In a study published in January's Microbiome, researchers mixed purified intestinal bacterial cultures from a healthy donor to form RePOOPulate, a synthetic stool mixture.

It was then transplanted (part of it, the study notes, was "drizzled") into two patients with Clostridium difficile infection, an affliction causing severe diarrhea that's set off when antibiotics alter the bacteria in your gut. Both patients were women in their 70s who had experienced recurring CDI.

Two to three days after the treatment, the study's two participants regained their normal bowel patterns, which were still normal six months later. The necessary bacteria had successfully set up their colon colonization, using RePOOPulate as their Mayflower.

Since it is synthetic, RePOOPulate can be tailored to the patient's needs. It's also safer and more stable than the natural method, which might introduce a virus as well as the desired bacteria. Plus, a synthetic mixture can be reproduced as many times as necessary if future treatment is needed.

Researchers plan to continue studying the effectiveness of the stool substitute. With only two subjects in this experiment, the treatment is still in its preliminary stages, but it suggests synthetic stool could be a viable alternative in the future.

[National Geographic]

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Want to win this competitive Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the T-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

• Study Finds A Daily Dose Of Peanuts Under Your Tongue Helps Treat Peanut Allergies
• Researchers Reverse Engineer Fireflies To Make More Efficient LEDs
• Captive Hyena Figures Out A Meat Puzzle Faster Than Its Wild Cousin
• The Science Of Getting On 'The Price Is Right'

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

• The Best Of CES 2013: Popular Science's Products Of The Future
• Ralph Steadman Depicts Over 100 Extinct Boids
• BeerSci: How To Make Strong Beer Stronger
• The Self-Assembling, Self-Healing Material Of The Future Is... Blood
• Flexible, Paper-Like Tablet Computers Work Together To Make Computing More Like Shuffling Papers
• CES 2013: Wrap This Goop Around Your Fingers Then Smash Them With A Hammer
• Japan's 2011 Earthquake Happened In An Area Considered Low-Risk. Where's Next?
• Video: This Fish Climbs Up Waterfalls By Gripping With Its Mouth
• Do Natural Disasters Breed Health Epidemics?
• CES 2013: The Secret Side Of CES
• Hack Yourself An Emergency DIY Car Charger
• NASA Puts Space Shuttle Launch Facilities Up For Sale. Make An Offer!

Meet the Infiniti Q50, formerly the G37. In case you haven't heard, Infiniti is renaming all the cars in its lineup with the letter Q. (We don't know. It must have focus-grouped well.)

What we find interesting here is not the arbitrary-seeming naming convention but the steering technology: This is the first major production car to use steer-by-wire (although as @evchels reminded me, the EV1 used steer-by-wire back in the mid-1990s).

It's the automotive version of fly-by-wire; Infiniti calls it Direct Adaptive Steering. To vastly oversimplify, wires and processors and actuators, rather than mechanical linkages, relay the motion of the steering wheel to the actual wheels. (Sort of. The Q50 still has a conventional steering column, for backup.)

It's significant mainly because of what it could, eventually, maybe make possible. With steer-by-wire, there's no fundamental reason why you need a wheel to steer the car. A joystick would work. So would voice control. Or the keystrokes of the anonymous overlord who controls your every motion while still leaving you with the impression that you possess free will. Anyway, the car goes on sale at the end of the summer.

Bigelow Aerospace has for years been trying to get the world to take its inflatable space habitats seriously, and while some have regarded the Vegas-based firm's grand visions for such things as an inflatable orbiting space hotels and manned moon bases with skepticism, NASA has always been willing to listen to Bigelow's big ideas. And now, the space agency is investing in them. NASA has awarded the private space contractor a $17.8 million contract to develop a new inflatable addition to the International Space Station.

We first heard about this potential partnership almost exactly a year ago, but at that point an actual deal between NASA and Bigelow was anything but certain. Bigelow had previously launched two concept space habitats into orbit (unmanned, of course) demonstrating, at the very least, that they work in prototype. But that's a far cry from gaining a foothold aboard one of the world's most expensive science experiments.

For now, it appears the deal is going forward, though neither NASA nor Bigelow has released the details of the agreement (the two are holding a presser on Wednesday). Will the module actually be used as additional laboratory or living space for the astronauts aboard the ISS, or is it itself an experiment to see how inflatable space habitat technology might be deployed in future missions (or both)? More details on this when they become available.

[NASA]

Rain or shine, the battle of the Mississippi rages on. The vital shipping lane that supports middle-American economies from the Upper-Midwest to New Orleans is once again in dire straits as the Army Corps of Engineers struggles to control Big Muddy--this time by making it deeper. Wracked by the worst (and longest) droughts in memory, the Midwest and the river are critically short on water, so short that the shallowest stretch of the river between Cairo, Ill. and St. Louis could become unnavigable in the next month, and the Corps of Engineers is just about out of geoengineering options to mitigate the problem, NPR reports.

The Army Corps of Engineers has been building and managing the complex and sprawling system of levees, locks, dikes and spillways along the length of the Mississippi River for decades now, bending the river--which periodically wants to change its course, top its banks, and otherwise be, you know, a natural flowing body of water--to its will. Meanwhile, human development along the river offers the Corps a smaller and smaller envelope in which to err.

Usually when the Corps of Engineers finds itself in a jam along the Mississippi the culprit is heavy rainfall and flooding, which test the strength of decades-old levees and dams designed to keep the river in (as they did as recently as 2011). But right now, the Corps is scrambling to deal with precisely the opposite--even after tapping reservoirs all along the Upper-Midwest, there's simply not enough water to be had. With options dwindling, the Corps is once again trying to engineer its way around a natural calamity, calling into question whether or not our continued meddling with the natural flow of the Mississippi is simply digging us a bigger hole in the long run.

Right now, the Corps is quite literally digging a hole. Barges on the Mississippi in southern Illinois are heaving rocks out of the river in an attempt to dredge two more feet of depth through the shallowest stretch--enough to keep traffic flowing at least through the end of January. The good news for the Corps right now is that the Midwest has had some rain in recent weeks, and if it can get through this month the river should rise again (historically, the Mississippi's water level bottoms out in January and begins rising again in February and through the spring). But past performance is not always an indicator of future results. If the river doesn't begin rising again soon, the stretch between Cairo and St. Louis could become unnavigable for shipping vessels in the coming weeks, cutting off shipping in the Great Lakes region from the lower Mississippi River and its access to the shipping ports of New Orleans.

There is one other option. The Corps could open up the controls along the Missouri River--the Mississippi's biggest tributary--and let its waters flow into the Mississippi. But the Missouri basin itself is already quite parched, and besides it's illegal for the Corps to do so under its charter. It would likely take an emergency act by the President or Congress to open Missouri River waters up to the Mississippi, and then the Corps would have a whole new problem: a dried up Missouri River and a lot of angry interests along its banks.

So the Corps of Engineers has to go on digging, dredging, and ultimately praying for rain--a reminder that our attempts a geoengineering have a come a long way, but that they currently can take us only so far.

[NPR]

A Hong Kong-based company has introduced what's either the most annoying or the most brilliant eating utensil ever: a sensor-equipped fork that buzzes and lights up when you eat too fast, effectively irritating you into slowing down. The slower you eat, the less you eat, or so the theory goes. One fatal flaw: Hapifork is available in fork form only. So there's nothing to stop you from, say, picking up a spoon and shoveling a gallon of ice cream into your mouth. Hapifork was showcased at CES last week, and it's available on pre-order for $99. Here, Hapilabs's Philippe Monteiro Da Rocha explains how it works.

Aaron Swartz was an internet pioneer, a crucial part of the creation of RSS, Reddit, and Creative Commons. He was also, as of this past Friday, under investigation for allegedly taking millions of documents from JSTOR, an online directory of scholarly articles, with the presumed intention to publish them publicly and freely. But on Friday, Swartz was discovered dead in his Brooklyn apartment, having hanged himself.

As tribute, many of his fans and followers have begun posting links to research and academic papers, which are being collected by a new site. Swartz was a relentless proponent of open information; he fought repeatedly against JSTOR due to its tendency to charge the public for scholarly articles and pay the proceeds to publishers rather than authors. His stance was that these articles should be available to the public, for the public good, and that certainly if there is money exchanged, it should go to the authors rather than publishers.

At the time of writing, PDFTribute has over 1,500 collected links, ranging across all subjects. You can check them out here.

"If it goes into production…" So begins the second sentence of the press release for the Volkswagen Crossblue, a midsize SUV with a diesel plug-in hybrid powertrain. It would certainly be cool if the Crossblue becomes reality. Specifically designed specifically for the American market, the six-seater would get 14 miles of all-electric driving range from its 9.8-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery; the rest of the time if would blend power from a TDI diesel engine and two electric motors (one in front and one in the rear). In electric mode, it would get 89 mpge. In hybrid mode, fuel economy is 35 mpg. Good numbers for a family-size people mover. We'll see if it happens.