1931: The new invention of the coaxial cable is issued a U.S. patent, which will eventually deliver the gift of ubiquitous telephony and cable television.

How do you minimize signal interference for telecommunication? Easy: Take a wire that acts as an inner conductor and wrap an outer conductor around it, instead of running two wires side by side. That way, the electromagnetic field carrying the signal will only travel in the space between the inner and outer conductors. That will allow wider frequency range, too.

Duh.

That invention — known today as the coaxial cable, because the two conductors...

Eminent physicist Paul Davies has a proposal for you: a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. As it’s typically conceived, a round-trip Mars mission would take about two years and cost at least $80 billion. But you could cut 80 percent of the expense, Davies says, by nixing the return and initiating a permanent Mars colony. The hard part, he says, isn’t subsisting in a hostile environment millions of miles from home but changing the Space Shuttle-era culture of timidity. That’s starting to happen, though: The NASA Ames Research Center teamed up with Darpa ...