10 Innovations in Winemaking

Winemaking is an 8,000-year-old tradition, and the first wines tasted ... well, terrible. People added ash, resin and even lead to "enhance" the flavor. Luckily, most wines today are pretty darn tasty on their own, thanks to modern fermentation techniques and innovations in packaging that help your wine stay fresher longer, and you certainly don't have to worry that a wine-maker used lead to improve his product's flavor!
We've also seen a big shift in where we produce wine. Once considered a hoity-toity European beverage, wine is made and drunk all over the world, and you're as likely to find a decent glass of red at your neighborhood pizza joint as at a fancy French restaurant.
Winemakers have also gotten more conscious of their environmental impacts. Since a good wine starts with the grape, and good grapes start with good soil, the wine industry has stayed on the cutting edge of sustainable agriculture. Any vintner worth his salt knows that protecting the environment is more than just good for the planet -- it's good for his wines.
With such a long history, there have been lots of innovations through the centuries, from how winemakers grow grapes to how they market those bottles. Let's look at 10 of them.

10 Complete Falsehoods about Food

Few childhood rituals are as memorable as a Saturday morning meal with my grandparents. Like most members of the Greatest Generation, my grandfather ate eggs and bacon for breakfast, slathered his toast with real butter and drank coffee with every meal. My grandmother made sure we never went away hungry. Both lived well into their 90s.
Today, I can scarcely bite into bacon, crack an egg or put a knife to butter without feeling a pang of guilt. Not to mention my compulsion to drink eight glasses of water a day, fill my shopping bags with organic food and snatch sugary treats from the grasps of my children. And don't get me started on the penance I pay at the gym for eating a late-night bowl of ice cream.

5 Popular Invention Mashups

When early man attached a stick to a sharpened piece of stone, he set in motion a trend in the creation of tools: the mashup. Eventually, the wheel would meet water, the transistor would meet the radio, the phone would meet the printer and airplane wings would meet the rocket.

In modern times, it's nearly impossible to touch a tool -- from watches to ballpoint pens to electric razors -- that doesn't combine at least a few different technologies.
Here, we present five of the most popular tech mashups that make work easier, playtime more fun and getting around more eco-friendly.

10 Accidental Inventions You Won't Believe

In an era of constant innovation and discovery, we may not realize that most inventions take years -- even decades -- to develop. Although some breakthroughs take a lifetime of dedication, the curious mind needn't worry.

As history shows us, people have crafted new inventions and stumbled upon discoveries by accident. To agree with Nobel prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi: "A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind".
And a prepared mind is usually what it takes. As we learn about 10 accidental inventions and discoveries, remember that some were serendipitous, meaning they were stumbled upon by chance, whereas others occurred while the inventors were trying to discover something else. Take the Slinky, Silly Putty and Play-Doh, for instance. The inventors of these childhood amusements discovered them by chance while trying to discover or invent other things. Such accidental discoveries aren't that rare, actually.
In this article, we'll focus on some of the more unusual accidental discoveries, or ones that will leave you scratching your head in disbelief. These stories show that sometimes it takes a bit of luck to discover the next big thing.
So which inventions and discoveries happened by accident? Read on to learn more.

10 Future Inventions Everyone's Been Waiting For

We get it. You feel like all the science fiction of yesteryear promised you a future of flying cars and hoverboards, and none of it has come to pass. Sure, we have Segways and iPads, but it's small consolation when you wake up every day to a world without "Blade Runner" skylines. But these are only 1980s visions of the future. Back in the '50s and '60s, our expectations for the 21st century were even loftier. With science by our side, nothing seemed out of the question.
Just consider "Magic Highway USA." With an hour's worth of stunning animation, this May 1958 episode of "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" awed television audiences with depictions of automated global highways, underwater road systems and antigravity cars.

A year earlier, Disney's "Mars and Beyond" showed viewers what humanity's future on Mars might entail and even featured segments with famed German-American rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun. It all seemed possible -- and much of it still is.
In this article we'll look at 10 future inventions we've been waiting for all our lives. Which ones are just around the corner, and which ones are mere relics of our post-World War II dreams?

5 NASA Inventions You Won't Believe

Since its beginnings in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has had to invent everything it needed to make space missions possible, from protective suits for astronauts to the mirrors and software used on the Hubble telescope. But NASA was smart enough to know it couldn't do everything alone -- these are, after all, rocket scientists. It has partnered with businesses and scientists around the country to create some of the most amazing inventions the planet has ever seen, and not just Tang, the powdered orange drink famously used by astronauts on Gemini missions in the 1960s.

Take a look at these five amazing inventions, which were all developed by NASA for use in space but have found some amazing Earth-bound applications.

10 Completely Obvious Research Discoveries

Fun fact: If a car (preferably a luxury car) is parked in an illegal spot, you can completely solve the problem by plowing over it with an armored tank. Just ask Vilnius, Lithuania, mayor Arturas Zuokas.

OK, so that's not really research, but the stunt is hilarious to watch, even though the end result – a viral video and a useless pile of once-expensive scrap metal – is pretty predictable. So why do scientists, who last time we checked were not cranky mayors with tanks at their disposal who wanted to make a point, get tangled up in research that seems just as flat-out obvious?
Sometimes, it's an attempt to finally get some real data behind those observations everyone knows, or to disprove the things everyone knows but aren't really true. Especially when it comes to controversy, getting some science to support all that anecdotal evidence can be a good plan. But every once in a while, you have to wonder. Here are 10 studies that raised our eyebrows (but not necessarily our IQs).