Piezo-Windows

(Image by Thilo Bein.)

Over at Pruned is a neat idea for noise-canceling windows from some German researchers. Small piezoelectric patches are applied to a window and are used to both sense the vibrations from outside noise, and then attenuate them by vibrating the window 180 degrees out of phase to the noise. Much like noise-canceling head sets. Combine this with liquid crystal sunshades and you've got your Jetson's windows right there.

Also cool on pruned, the subterranean lives of cities and the slip displacements of a grid projected onto a sphere.