In the past, someone telling you to "put on your thinking cap" did little more than get your attention. In the future? If Australian researchers can make good, it could mean tripling your complex problem solving powers and opening up whole new avenues of thinking with a very real and physical "thinking cap."

It's a huge problem: Lots of plastic goes unrecycled. Even in places with recycling programs (like New York City), the only plastic items recycled are bottles, leaving everything else as waste. What to do with all that unrecyclable plastic? A Japanese inventor has put forward an answer: melt the stuff and turn it into oil.

The seemingly never-ending search for a 3D display without those cumbersome glasses goes on, and here's the latest: the AquaLux 3D system projects images onto numerous layers of water droplets. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have it tweaked up so well, you can play multileveled Tetris on it.

Stringed instruments have been around for centuries, but nobody's figured out how to keep those strings in tune — until now. The breakthrough introduced at CES 2010 is called the Evertune Bridge, with individual springs constantly pulling against each string...