SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

More Power to Us

 1.  Water pipes beneath sunbaked asphalt roads will capture heat and pump hot water to nearby buildings.

 2.  Wind generated by fast-moving cars will be captured by small turbines built into highway lane barriers or overpasses.

 3.  Cargo ships will be powered by giant, kitelike sails; expect 1,500 such vessels by 2015.

By the Numbers

39 Million — Number of gene snippets collected from 270 people and studied by anthropologists to assess human evolution. The news: We are evolving more quickly than in the past and becoming more different from one another.

240 — Gallons of water in new balloons for fighting forest fires. Each is packed in a cardboard box that is ripped open by the wind when it is pushed out of the plane. The balloons burst in midair.

30 — Minutes that two children will need to play on a specially equipped seesaw to generate enough power to run a laptop computer for about 20 minutes.

People are talking about . . .

• current-day bloom times of wildflowers and trees in Concord, Massachusetts, vs. those in the late 19th century.
• the future of the human species: "Our heads seem to be getting higher and our brains seem to be getting somewhat smaller," says Henry Harpending, anthropologist at the University of Utah.
• another Earth: Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope spotted a 10-million-year-old star, 424 light-years away, with enough matter to create a Mars-size planet.