Just the other day, I was showing a friend of mine a satellite image of her house. It was as easy as pointing, clicking, and typing in a home address. Most of the readers here probably think “Eh, so… what’s the big deal? I’ve known this forever, just go to Google and download Google Earth.”. The thing is… my friend has not stopped talking about it since I showed her.

For the past year I’ve lurked in the shadows of betterhumans.com. I log into this site practically everyday to keep up with the latest amazing technological advancements. Believe it or not, most of what is known in this community is far from being common knowledge, which has led me to start this thread. If you were to show something that exists today that one would find hard to believe, what would you show? In the past and the present, what tech advancements have made you say “Wow?”

Let's try and keep this to one liners, here’s mine:

- A fighter jet flown by a rat brain in a Petri dish: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/12/06/1102182227308.html

Actual Patents Of Mind Control And Behavior Modification Technology (some of this is utter rubbish, especially some claims made for sound equipment which is almost incapable of reproducing the specified ƒ ranges reliably, but...)
i'd be willing to bet there's something in some of it.

Rice University's Nanocar (with buckyballs for wheels).

www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=12107

Mass-production of carbon nanotubes.

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050815/pf/050815-8_pf.html

Wistar Institute's super-regenerating mice.

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,68962,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

DARPA Challenge won by self-driving car.

http://news.com.com/Driverless+robots+reach+milestone+in+DARPA++race/2100-11394_3-5891793.html

Molecule walks like a human.

http://www.newsroom.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=1166

It doesn't happen to me very often, but it still happens sometimes when I read about some research that is going on somewhere on something that I didn't think anybody was working on yet.

Or the moment, when a technology which I read about many years before, and might have been using myself for a while and then suddenly realize that everybody is doing it.

But for the most part I am more amazed at how bad some products are while they could easily have been so much better.

This one is kind of old but, when I read about it, it made me go "Wow!" It stunned me for its utterly bizarre lateral thinking:

Probing the deep mantle with huge blobs of molten iron.

This is just a video, but i'm surprised to see how fast the development is going. Let's hope it really does advance exponentially.

Robot motion