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Some of our favorite stories this week:

Warships of the future may <a href="http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/slimed-hulls-could-boost-fuel-efficiency-ships
“>emit a lubricating slime from their hulls to glide through water with less resistance, increasing speed and fuel efficiency

And speaking of slime, our resident DIY guru Mikey Sklar’s 1984 diesel Benz runs on vegetable oil. Here’s how he converted it.

An MIT scientist artfully demonstrates how organic LEDs work by making one out of a good ol’ kosher dill.

Japan’s Robo-One competition features, among many other ‘bots, one that’s controlled via neural signals and stabs with a knife

Monkeys have already moved cyborg arms with their minds, but now they’re doing it WIRELESSLY thanks to a new implant created in Utah.

And James Naismith be proud–in the future, students of your ball-in-peach-basket game will make unbelievable–yet physically possible–basketball shots from hundreds of feet away.

Illustration by the great Baarbarian

Here’s what we can all look forward to:

We’ll take HD video from space via hydrogen balloons whenever we feel like it.
We’ll snort stem cells to fix our brains, rather than opening our skulls with surgery
We will finally get to remote-control a cyborg beetle in flight–if DARPA lets us
We’ll cower in shame at the inadequacy of our toy laser tag guns while NASA blasts one of their spacecraft with a giant beam from 250,000 miles
And finally, we’ll continue to welcome India to the club of space-faring nations after they’ve launched seven satellites with a single rocket

Until next week, this is the future!

[This week's future vision rendered by Baarbarian]

Dust storms are common in Australia’s central desert, the “Red Center,” but rarely are they blown eastward toward the coastal cities.

To put the density in perspective, air pollution levels have been measured at 15,500 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter of atmosphere. Compare that to a 10-20 microgram density on a normal, clear day and 300-500 micrograms per cubic meter in a brush fire’s heavy smoke.

Elsewhere in Australia, the seemingly apocalyptic conditions aren’t just limited to a red sky–earthquakes, hailstorms and bushfires have struck various sites on the eastern coast.

[BBC, Flickr Blog]

There’s some irony involved, too–static electricity has long been the enemy of the darkroom photographer, with a single spark able to scar undeveloped film forever. Sugimoto’s going for the opposite here, and capturing some great work inspired by Man Ray’s famous photograms.

Or maybe Sugimoto was inspired by our own Theodore Gray, who demonstrated how to trap electricity in a block of clear acrylic with Lichtenberg figures. This is a good occasion to bring that video back up from the archives. Beautiful stuff.

Fraenkel Gallery via PDN, Kottke

Don’t forget to tune in to the premiere of our new show on the Science Channel, PopSci’s Future Of. Tonight the topic is Superhumans, and host Baratunde Thurston will guide us through the amazing work being done in body-enhancement tech, from prosthetic limbs better than biological ones, a powder regrows missing body parts, and a bionic eye that turns your world into a computer screen.

For more on the show, check out the Science Channel’s Future Of page, and for more on your guide to the Future Now, check out our interview with Baratunde here. Enjoy!