James' World 2

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s does more than create ambitious telescopes that can see the beginning of time and send people to the moon and back. It’s also responsible for Michael Phelps’ swimsuit, LASIK surgery, and the selfie. The everyday products listed below are only 15 of the more than 2,000 consumer products NASA considers “spinoff technology” from the space program. They are all based on technology and discoveries either developed directly by NASA, in partnership with NASA, or through funding from NASA.

If your mattress, pillow, couch, desk chair, or bike seat contains memory foam (aka “tempur” or “temper foam”), you can thank NASA. The material was developed by NASA-funded aeronautical engineer Charles Yost and used to create better shock-absorbing aircraft seats for test pilots.

The computer mouse was invented at Stanford in the early 1960s by Doug Englebart, whose research into interactive computer inputs was funded by NASA. The research was championed by NASA’s Bob Taylor, who moved on to manage Xerox and further developed the computer mouse.If you ever check your temperature with an infrared thermometer like I do, you wouldn’t be able to do it without NASA. The space agency developed infrared thermometers to gauge the temperature of distant cosmic object, and the technology eventually found its way to home thermometers used by hypochondriacs everywhere.

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Photo: Dima Zel (Shutterstock)

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It would be mixing ad campaigns if not metaphors to say that Swedes think differently about design, but I think there’s something to it: Saab was famously left field, even down to where it located the ignition switch; Volvo carefully treads its own path with safety foremost in its mind but with crisp modern design. And then there’s Koenigsegg.

Located at a former Swedish fighter base, this company has been ploughing its own furrow through the automotive superlatives: supercars, hypercars, now megacars. But always in its own way—how else to explain a three-cylinder engine with pneumatic actuators instead of camshafts, a V8 with no flywheel, or a transmission with seven clutches that’s both nine-speed automatic but also six-speed manual, with clutch pedal no less?

At this year’s Monterey Car Week, few are as close to automotive royalty as the company’s eponymous founder, Christian von Koenigsegg. The company’s stand at one end of The Quail was among the most mobbed throughout the day, as young TikTokkers in their best suits competed for his attention, or maybe just another look at his latest creation, the CC850. Part 50th birthday present to himself, part celebration of the company entering its third decade, it’s a new take on Koenigsegg’s first offering, the CC8S.

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Making a success of the supercar game is not easy, but Christian von Koenigsegg’s company has survived two decades and continues to develop innovative new technology that’s years ahead of the competition. Ars talked to him to find out what he’s most proud of.

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Eight years ago, a meteor believed to have been 2 feet long entered Earth’s atmosphere at more than 100,000 miles an hour before exploding into tiny, hot fragments and falling into the South Pacific Ocean.

Some scientists believe it came from another star system, which would make it the first known interstellar object of its size to impact Earth.

Now, professor Avi Loeb, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is planning an expedition to retrieve fragments of the meteor from the ocean floor. By analyzing the debris, he is hoping to determine the object’s origins — even going so far as to make the extraordinary suggestion that it could be a technological object created by aliens.

Yet astronomers are wary of his claims, citing a lack of data on the object and insufficient evidence to support his bold conjectures about alien life.

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