The world's first-ever smartshoe is called Le Chal, which means "let's go" in Hindi. Designed by Anirudh Sharma, who works at the MIT Media Lab, and Krispian Lawrence, these shoes work as haptic navigation devices that connect to your smartphone.

The basic idea is pretty simple. You simply tell your phone where to go using the app's voice recognition software, and the app uses GPS to plot the course from your current location. Once you're on your way, the shoes vibrate when it's time to turn—on the left side for a left turn and on the right for a right turn. The vibrations become more intense as you get closer to your destination.

Spider silk of fantastical, superhero strength is finally speeding toward commercial reality — at least a synthetic version of it is. The material, which is five times stronger than steel, could be used in products from bulletproof vests to medical implants, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN).

Alex Scott, a senior editor at C&EN, notes that spider silk's impressive strength has been studied for years, and scientists have been trying to make a synthetic version of the super-strong protein in the lab.

A monster virus comes back from ancient times to wreak havoc on mankind. That may sound like a blurb from a science fiction novel, but as scientists have known for some time, it's not at all impossible. And thanks to the recent revival of a 30,000-year-old giant virus in Siberia, there's increasing concern that it might describe our future.

But before you go diving into your hermetically sealed fallout shelters, it's important to note that, at least thus far, this and every other virus we've found sleeping deep beneath the surface hasn't been of any threat to mankind. So why's everybody talking about this discovery like it's the opening of the seventh seal? In proving that dormant viruses this ancient can, in fact, be revived, we've just opened up a Pandora's box of pandemic proportions.