The train that never stops

The youth condom

Earlier this year,after several studies,including one by the Swiss government,found that young teenagers had trouble finding suitably sized condoms,a company called Lamprecht AG started selling the Hotshot,a smaller-than-usual condom marketed especially to 13- to-15-year-olds. Controversy ensued.

The bra mask

Treating victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986,the Ukrainian scientist Elena Bodnar realised that her patients could have drastically reduced their radiation poisoning if theyd had immediate access to even a crude air filter. This fall she commercially introduced the Emergency Bra,whose cups can be separated and converted into face masks.

D.I.Y. macroeconomics

Until recently,the economics profession largely controlled the production,dissemination and interpretation of economic data. Now theres a new trend afoot: do-it-yourself macroeconomics,in which ordinary citizens pull apart the data and come to their own conclusions. The democratisation of economics owes much to the financial crisis that first hit in 2007. That ongoing catastrophe,which few economists predicted,tarnished the professions reputation,prompting some to look elsewhere for answers. They turned towhere else?the Internet,where vast amounts of economic data that had once been hidden from public view were now online. Sites like FRED,maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis,enabled anyone with a connection to the Web to download data on everything from local home-price indexes to credit-card balances to weekly fluctuations in diesel prices.

Doping bicycles

When Fabian Cancellara won the Tour of Flanders in April,doping accusations soon followed. This time,though,it was the bike that stood accused,not the rider. A popular YouTube video lingered on Cancellaras idiosyncratic finger movements: was he pressing an on switch,activating a hidden battery-powered motor? The cycling federation did not investigate,but X-ray machines,for the first time,were used at the Tour de France in July.

The armoured T-shirt

In an article in May in Advanced Materials,researchers gave their recipe for infusing a T-shirt with boron carbide,the main component of bulletproof vests. Dip a cotton T-shirt in a boron-nickel solution,and put it in a furnace heated to 1,160C,and you have a hybrid textile of boron-carbide nanowire and carbon-microfibrea flexible shirt reinforced with the third-hardest material on the planet.

Emotional spell-check

ToneCheck,an e-mail-outbox filter that works as a sort of emotional spell-check,offers typists a chance to reconsider their words before hitting send. If the content of a message exceeds a preset threshold for negative emotions like anger or sadness,the e-mailer is confronted with a warning and a chance to revise. Drawing on the opinions of thousands of people who have been paid to evaluate the emotional charge of various phrases,the software can also detect unseemly levels of positive emotions like affection or elation.

Shoes that leap

The Concept 1,a basketball shoe released this summer,is said to add nearly four inches to a players vertical leap without sacrificing running ability or lateral movement. A springlike mechanism implanted in front of the ball of the foot harnesses and releases the downward force of a players prejump crouch. The NBA banned the 300 shoe from competition this fall; the NCAA has yet to do so.

2000s: A great decade

Two recessions. 9/11. Iraq. Afghanistan. You might think the last decade was among the worst in modern history. But according to the economist Charles Kenny,author of Getting Better,a forthcoming book on global development,youd be wrong. Average worldwide income,at 10,600,is 25 per cent higher than it was a decade ago. Thanks to increases in agriculture efficiency,cereal production grew at double the rate of population in the developing world. Vaccine initiatives have helped cut the death rate from common diseases like measles by 60 percent. Child mortality is down 17 per cent. One of the many factors behind these improvements was increased telecommunications especially television in Africa and Asia: education and better health practices could penetrate communities where illiteracy and geographic isolation long stymied public-health efforts. This resulted in hundreds of millions of people who were better educated,more politically engaged and more aware of social and health issues,creating a virtuous cycle of progress.

Aftercrimes

After an earthquake,changes to the earth increase the likelihood of aftershocks occurring in a particular place and timesomething that seismologists have become good at forecasting. This year,the mathematician George Mohler showed that what holds for earthquakes also holds true for crime: not only does an initial crime beget future offences,but these aftercrimes also tend to occur according to a predictable distribution in time and space. The idea of follow-on crimes is nothing newonce a house is burglarised,police know that criminals are likely to return to the same house or others nearbybut Mohler showed that the timing and location of the crimes can be statistically predicted with a high degree of accuracy. Using L.A.P.D. burglary data to identify a series of random,initial offences in a sector of the city and adapting algorithms used to forecast aftershocks,he predicted that 17 percent of the citys burglaries would occur in a 5-percent area of the city over the next year.

Social media as social index

According to a number of recent studies,it now seems possible that the millions of posts and status updates on social networking sites are adding up to something culturally and financially priceless. This past April,for instance,Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman at HP Labs demonstrated that by analysing the positive or negative sentiments expressed in 2.8 million Twitter messages about 24 movies,they could predict how the films would perform at the box office. Their methodologyan algorithm,actually,that their company is now in the process of patentingworked significantly better than the Hollywood Stock Exchange,another popular tool for predicting box-office success.