Exoskeletons, Lasers, and Jet Packs: How to Be a Real-Life Iron Man

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Aside from the (admittedly considerable) appeal of watching Robert Downey Jr. crack wise as billionaire genius-turned-superhero Tony Stark, perhaps the biggest lure of Marvel’s Iron Man movies is finding out just what kind of amazing toys and gadgets he’s built into the latest version of his high-tech armor this time around. Although such innovations as a costume that unfolds itself from a suitcase onto your body (Iron Man 2‘s “Mark V” armor) or clothes that follow you around when you wear special bracelets (Marvel’s The Avengers‘s Mark VII armor) remain the stuff of science fiction, a surprising amount of the tech on display in the Iron Man mythos has counterparts in our world, even if the reality is a bit less colorful and unlikely to help us in the case of a Chitauri invasion.

From strength-enhancing exoskeletons to repulsor rays and sentient robot sidekicks, becoming a real-life Iron Man wouldn’t be easy — and it definitely wouldn’t be cheap — but it wouldn’t be entirely outside the realm of possibility, either.

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.Click link below for article and gallery:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/04/real-life-iron-man/#slideid-142484

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A Pilot’s Guide to an Enormous Continent-Crossing Solar Plane

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Bertrand Piccard is somewhere high over central California right now, flying southward in a giant airplane powered only by the sun.

Piccard is the co-founder and pilot of Solar Impulse, a solar powered airplane that left Moffett Field south of San Francisco shortly after 6 a.m. PDT today to begin an eight-week journey across the country. As impressive as that sounds, it is but a trial run for the dream he and fellow pilot André Borschberg have been working toward since 2007: a zero-emissions flight around the world in 2015.

The longest journey, as they say, begins with the first step, which for Piccard ends after midnight tonight when he touches down in Phoenix. He and his crew have spent several weeks in California, assembling and testing the aircraft after having it flown from Switzerland aboard a Boeing 747.

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The Solar Impulse airplane, over the Sacramento River Delta on the first leg of its transcontinental flight. Photo: F. Merz/Solar Impulse

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.Click link below for article and gallery:

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/05/solar-impulse-2/#slideid-57437

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First Lady of the United States: Michelle Obama Embodies Class and Substance

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This is a powerful gallery of pictures of our first lady in many different situations.

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.Click link below for gallery and videos:

http://www.caslight.org/michelle.html

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