1943: Brothers László and Georg Bíró, Hungarian refugees living in Argentina, patent the ballpoint pen. A half-century-old idea is coming to commercial fruition.

Lewis Waterman's invention of a practical fountain pen, patented in 1884, had solved the problem of portability. You no longer had to carry around an inkwell to be able to write when and where you wanted. But the ink still took a while to dry and was subject to running and smudging.

American banker John L. Loud patented a ballpoint pen in 1888. It used a ball-and-socket to deliver sticky, quick-drying ink. Too sticky: The ink was so coarse, it didn't really work well on paper. (It was a good idea on paper, except literally.) It did find industrial uses for writing on leather and cloth.

László Bíró was a Hungarian journalist who saw an idea in the quick-drying inks newspapers use. His brother Georg, a chemist, helped him with technical aspects. They used a tiny -- and precisely ground -- ball bearing to serve two functions. It distributed ink evenly from the cartridge to the paper for writing, and it contained the rest of the ink inside the cartridge.

The Bíró brothers made progress on improving the ballpoint to the point, so to speak, that it could write as smoothly as a fountain pen. But the situation in their homeland was deteriorating. When World War II started, they fled from Budapest to Paris, then to Madrid and finally to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

There, they applied for a patent and sought financial backing. One of their contacts, an English accountant named Harry Martin, realized that the ballpoint solved a problem faced by Britain's Royal Air Force: Conventional pens were unsuitable for writing aircraft logs, because they leaked, were too sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure, and wouldn't let you write on a vertical or overhead surface.

Martin eventually flew to Washington and London, convincing both the U.S. Air Force and the RAF to adopt the new technology. By the time the Allies won the war, the ballpoint shared the luster of victory.

When the pens went into commercial production in 1945, they were a sensation. In the United States, the Reynolds Pen sold for $12.50 (about $150 in today's money). Yet people swarmed a New York department store to buy 8,000 of them on the first day of sale.

What? People lining up to be the first to buy new technology? Where have we heard that before? You mean, it happened in the old days, too?

Some of the earliest versions of commercial ballpoints leaked and smudged, but manufacturers eventually worked the bugs out. What? A technology brought to market before it's quite ready? How could that be?

Today, the ballpoint is what most people mean when they say just pen. And in much of the world, the generic name for a ballpoint pen is biro. In Argentina, by the way, it's a birome.

Source: BBC h2g2

Even with gas at four bucks a gallon, Yahya Fahimuddin enjoys filling his car. It's a contest, a chance to see how many miles he can squeeze from every tank. He's getting about 45 mpg these days and says you can, too.

He's a hypermiler, one of a growing number of people going to often extreme lengths to get 40, 50, even 60 mpg or more. "It's like a videogame," he says. "Can I beat my new high score?"

It's a game that some say started during the gas-rationing days of World War II and came back during the oil embargo of the 1970s. It's catching on again as fuel prices spiral out of sight, and skilled players say small changes in driving style -- eliminating hard acceleration, turning off the engine at stop lights, coasting to a stop -- can bring big improvements in fuel economy no matter what you drive.

"If you combine a handful of simple hypermiling techniques, you can easily see increases of 20 percent," said Tim Fulton, a 25-year-old designer from West Bend, Wisconsin. "Use a few more techniques and 30 percent is yours."

Fulton routinely gets 55 mpg from his 1997 Toyota Paseo, a car the EPA rates at 29 mpg. He started hypermiling about 18 months ago when he landed a new job 37 miles from home and got tired of burning so much gas. He mastered "pulse and glide" -- turning off the engine and coasting while driving. "This technique alone dramatically increased my mileage from 38 mpg to 47 mpg on my first tank," he says. "I was blown away."

Pulse and glide is controversial -- and in some states, illegal -- because the engine drives the power steering and brakes. Shut it off, critics warn, and you can't steer or stop effectively. Hypermilers say the risks are overstated. Still, there are easier -- and, arguably, safer -- things you can do to boost fuel economy. The first suggestion?

"Try the speed limit," says Rick Harrell, a moderator at the website ecomodder.com and its list of more than 100 ways to improve fuel economy. "It's a crazy idea, but it works."

The U.S. Department of Energy says gas mileage plummets above 60 mph. Every 5 mph above that speed is akin to paying another 20 cents a gallon for gas. For that reason, hypermilers scrupulously obey the speed limit. They also use the accelerator and brake as little as possible, preferring instead to coast. The truly hardcore coast to a stop, avoid using brakes around corners and draft behind trucks or other large vehicles.

Following the speed limit was quite a change for Harrell, who favored high-performance cars before getting the hypermiling bug three years ago. "I knew I needed to slow down for both environmental purposes and not to scare the living daylights out of my passengers," he says.

These days he's driving a 1998 Acura Integra and getting as much as 40 mpg in a car the EPA rates at 24. His quest for better fuel efficiency started with the car, which got a tune-up and an engine-block heater for more efficient starts. He inflated the tires to the maximum listed on the sidewall to reduce rolling resistance. And he installed a fuel-consumption gauge that provides real-time data about how much gas he's burning. He and other hypermilers highly recommend them.

"The instant feedback was great," Harrell says. "Simple things like slowing down on the highway, timing traffic lights (to maintain) momentum and coasting with the engine off started to push that fuel-efficiency number higher and higher."

Hypermilers call the gadgets "game gauges" because they're always trying to see how high they can go. The best of them get absurd figures. Wayne Gerdes, founder of cleanmpg.com and the king of hypermilers, recently drove a Honda Civic hybrid 800 miles from Chicago to New York on a single tank of gas. That works out to 65 mpg.

That's low for Darin Cosgrove of Brockville, Ontario. The co-founder of ecomodder.com averages 69 mpg in his 1998 Geo Metro, a car that got 40 mpg off the showroom floor. He's gotten as many as 133 mpg on a long trip by going slowly and using pulse and glide. He's also modified his car to make it more aerodynamic and tinkered with the drivetrain to improve efficiency.

Fahimuddin hopes to achieve those kind of numbers with his 2000 Honda Insight. It was a heap when he bought it and he's overhauled just about everything, but the clutch is shot so he's only getting 45 mpg or so. He'll replace it eventually, and add a belly pan to improve aerodynamics under the car. He figures that and a few tweaks to his driving style will get him to 60 mph.

But that's just the beginning.

"I'd like to hit 70 mpg. Seventy would be pretty sick," he says. "It's doable."

SAN FRANCISCO -- As conferences go, Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference ranks low on the sexiness factor. It's a good bet that, without the promise of a new, iPhone 3G, the programmer-centric conference would not have drawn the hundreds of broadcast, print and blog journalists that it did.

Fortunately, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did have a new iPhone up his sleeve, and after spending an hour selling the company's new iPhone development tools and previewing some of the platform's forthcoming apps, Jobs delivered what we all came for: the new phone.

The iPhone 3G, as it will be called, will cost $200 for an 8-GB version, $300 for a 16-GB version. Both will be available in a new, slightly rounded case with a shiny black-plastic back. The 16-GB version will also be available with a white back.

Breaking with Jobs' keynote tradition, the iPhone 3G is not yet available: Both models will go on sale July 11 in 22 countries. Apple plans to make the phone available in 75 countries within several months.

For details, check out our full coverage of the WWDC 2008 keynote, or browse these slides for the highlights.

Left: Jobs' normal "reality-distortion field" seemed to be at ebb during today's keynote, which many observers noted was less exciting than a typical Jobs presentation. Indeed, Jobs -- looking thinner than ever in his trademark black mock-turtleneck -- let his deputies take most of the stage time. More than one audience member noticed that Jobs seemed to be looking a little wan and have less energy than usual. And maybe it's time for a new turtleneck? This one was looking a little gray, not to mention baggy.

Apple's Phil Schiller, a regular fixture at Apple keynotes, touted the phone's new integration with Microsoft Exchange using "ActiveStink -- I mean ActiveSync." Was that an intentional dig at the Cupertino company's sometime competitor, sometime partner? Or was it a true Freudian slip, indicating Schiller's habitual distaste for the nearly ubiquitous Microsoft standard?

It's not clear. One thing is sure, though: Apple has provided deep and meaningful enterprise tools in the 2.0 version of the iPhone software, including the ability to "push" e-mail, calendar and contact updates. The company has also given IT managers the ability to zero out any data on a corporate iPhone, remotely -- handy when one of them goes missing.

Apple executive Scott Forstall demonstrates how easy it is to create an iPhone application using the software development kit's new tools. You just drag in this snippet of code here, drop a button there and presto! Instant contact manager.

Like other software-development demos, this one had a lot in common with cooking demonstrations on TV: So much depends on having everything set up just right, ahead of time. In real life, you'd spend half a day doing prep work before you got to do the five minutes of dragging-and-dropping that Forstall showed onstage.

Still, developer after developer testified to the ease of developing iPhone apps. It's clear that if you're used to coding OS X apps, the iPhone should be a cakewalk.

One of the applications shown at the March preview of the iPhone SDK was Sega's popular Nintendo DS title Super Monkey Ball. This game will be available for the iPhone for $10 -- once the iPhone App Store opens -- and will feature all four cute little monkeys and more than 100 different levels. Players control the rolling monkeys simply by tilting the iPhone this way and that.

Developers who want to create location-aware applications have plenty to drool over with the new iPhone 2.0 operating system, which has plenty of support for geographic data. In addition to the first-generation iPhone's ability to do geolocation by triangulating nearby WiFi hotspots and cell towers, the iPhone 3G will also have a GPS receiver, giving the device the ability to track its movements with great precision.

In this demo by location-sensitive social network Loopt, the orange pin denotes the user's location, while blue pins show nearby friends. Looking for someone to have lunch with? Loopt can help you hook up with someone and can even help recommend a cute little local cafe. (Friends not included.)

Major League Baseball's iPhone app takes advantage of the phone's fast 3-G and WiFi data connections to provide real-time game scores -- and "real-time video clips." That doesn't mean you'll be able to watch streaming video of the whole game, but highlight clips will be available for you to view within "minutes" after they happen, the MLB developer promised.

Among the most impressive iPhone app demos of the day were graphics-intensive ones, including a medical-imaging program and this game, called Kroll, from Digital Legends. In the demo, a fully animated character ran through a beautifully rendered fantasy landscape, battling winged demons and an immense, scary-looking giant whose steps shook the very screen.

Like the many other developers who took the stage, Digital Legends touted the ease of porting its OS X software to the iPhone -- and also provided an impressive demonstration of the phone's built-in 3-D video capabilities. In terms of graphics quality, this game looked comparable to what you might find on a PlayStation 2.

Perhaps the biggest news of the day was a three-digit number: $199, the price of the 8-GB iPhone 3G. That's a significant drop from the current price for the 8-GB first-generation iPhone ($399), and a huge drop from the $600 that it cost when Apple first introduced the iPhone a year ago.

As if the mere figure weren't impressive enough, Jobs had the price stomp onto the screen with massive booming sounds, saving him from having to actually say the word Boom.

The new iPhone 3G comes with a shiny black-plastic back, in contrast to the current model's matte aluminum. If you decide to spring for the more capacious 16-GB model (which will cost $299), you can also choose a shiny white-plastic back.

The iPhone 3G itself doesn't appear to be any smaller, thinner or lighter than the current version, although it has tapered, slightly rounded edges, which will either make it feel thinner or make it feel more like a bar of soap.

Jobs made his customary brief appearance in the middle of the crowd, surrounded by burly bodyguards, after the keynote wrapped up. However, he didn't spend any time chitchatting with the hoi polloi, and no one got any hands-on time with his shiny new gadget.

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in late August 2005 and the levees around the city broke, flooding the city and killing hundreds, Ed Link was as surprised as everyone else.

He shouldn't have been. As one of the nation's foremost hurricane experts, Link, a professor at the University of Maryland, had access to the government's most sophisticated mathematical models for predicting damage from big Gulf Coast storms. But those models weren't accurate because the data they were based on were incomplete, out of date or just plain wrong.

As the floodwaters receded and the Army Corps of Engineers rushed to repair the levees, the government asked Link to lead a team of engineers and scientists from the government and private sector -- 300 in all -- to recode those old models. The goal of the vaguely named Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force was twofold, Link told Wired.com: first, "to get that knowledge built back into the levee repairs so the same vulnerability wasn't built into the system again. The second was to come up with a 'risk assessment' looking forward."

In other words, to have a much better idea, grounded in solid science, of who might be killed or have their property destroyed in future Gulf Coast hurricanes.

The levees have long since been fixed and upgraded, but the risk assessment -- based on a mind-boggling 2 million equations -- is just now nearing completion. As the math came together beginning in 2007, the task force began publishing color-coded, interactive maps in an effort to show Gulf Coast residents what kind of danger they likely faced from hurricanes. The Google Earth-based maps can be found on the Army Corps website.

The ultimate "risk" map, the culmination of the task force's work representing tens of thousands of square miles from Florida to Texas, is slated for release this week.

Gathering the data for the levee upgrade and the risk maps took three years of back-breaking, mind-numbing effort by hundreds of team members using a surprising mix of high technology, old-fashioned detective work, trick psychology and, when all else failed, intuition. The results have revolutionized authorities' understanding of Gulf Coast hurricanes.

But whether the public will pay heed is another matter.

Katrina dissipated on August 30, 2005. In early September, rescuers had just begun going house to house in New Orleans looking for the living and the dead. But Link's team was already on the ground collecting what he called "perishable" data, such as the depths and locations of floodwaters.

For many team members, data collection was dirty, dangerous, thankless work -- and it meant short-shifting their day jobs. "A lot of people just quit what they were doing and basically worked full-time" on the new storm model, Link told Wired.com.

But for one key team member, it wasn't just about sloshing through flooded streets. Don Resio, a scientist working for the Army Corps of Engineers, went hunting for old data sets from decades-old storms, in hopes that historic hurricanes might whisper hints about future ones.

Resio told Wired.com that his hunt mostly involved polite requests to cooperative government agencies like the National Weather Service. But other, equally vital reams of data were locked in the safes of the Gulf Coast oil companies, who, with billions of dollars invested in offshore drilling platforms, were especially concerned with the high winds that come with big storms.

Resio needed that data, but it wasn't his to demand. His solution? "I made 'em feel guilty," he recalled with a laugh.

Slowly, the data came together, culled from more than 150 storms dating back a hundred years. Key figures came from new, high-tech microwave sensors installed aboard "hurricane-hunting" C-130 and P-3 airplanes operated by the Air Force and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A scale-model levee was stress-tested in the world's most powerful centrifuge.
Courtesy Army Corps of Engineers

To create entirely new data from scratch, the task force built a detailed model of New Orleans and flooded it, essentially recreating Katrina on a nonlethal scale. And to zero in on the levees, the team built a miniature earthen levee inside the world's most powerful centrifuge. They added water and spun the centrifuge at speeds duplicating hurricane-force wind and waves, looking for when, where and how the levee would fail.

There were some surprising revelations in the course of the task force's investigation … some of which helped explain why Katrina had taken so many people by surprise. For one, Link's team found that the existing elevation maps of New Orleans were way off and would have to be totally redrawn. "We found things two feet below where people though they were," Link said. Obviously that made the city more vulnerable to flooding.

Also, in tightening up and rewriting the old mathematical models, the task force gained a clearer understanding of the limitations of modern science. "There's a lot we just don't know," Resio told Wired.com. But, as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, there are "unknown unknowns," which are bad, and there are "known unknowns," which are somewhat better. Finally the hurricane task force knew the basic outline of what it didn't know.

But when it comes to math, even known unknowns can be tricky. Resio said that for some equations, he and the other researchers needed figures, any figures. So they had to guess. That meant thinking like a hurricane, trying to intuit how wind and water might behave under certain conditions.

Necessary educated guesses aside, Resio told Wired.com that uncertainty is a key parameter of the new storm models -- especially as global warming whips the planet's fundamental weather patterns in unpredictable ways. The team knew they had to capture this unpredictability mathematically and build it into the models.

"We did a bunch of numerical tests to determine variability," Resio said. In other words, they looked at the surprising behaviors of past storms. Were winds unusually fast? Or was the ratio between the size of the storm and wind speed different than the norm? "We added that variability back into the model as a random function," Resio said, so that when officials use the new models to predict hurricane damage, they get a range of predictions. It's one of the new models' greatest strengths, Resio said.

After three years of labor by hundreds of engineers and scientists, emergency managers now have a much better understanding of what kind of damage a major storm might cause. But that doesn't mean that the people most at risk -- Gulf Coast residents -- take these predictions seriously.

Sometimes all the mathematical models and colorful maps in the world won't change a person's mind, which is why many New Orleans residents have rebuilt destroyed homes in exactly the same place, and to the same construction standard, as before Katrina.

To combat public ignorance and complacency, Resio's team includes "risk communicators" -- basically, PR reps for hurricanes. Ironically, the high-tech storm models and sophisticated maps that the risk communicators rely on might actually undermine their work, according to one academic who has studied storms.

"The technologically enhanced discourse of prediction conveys the sense that weather media viewers can be prepared," Marita Sturken, from New York University, wrote in 2006. She called this a technological "selling of preparedness."

Resio is aware of the challenge in making potential hurricane victims believe that they're at risk, even when the world's most sophisticated storm models insist they are. "How do you convince people they need to be concerned?" he said, sighing. "The risk communicators have their hands full."

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