Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Blind spots in cars are a significant safety issue. You might be at a stop and not notice a pedestrian about to cross because they're hidden by your car's frame. But a 14-year-old inventor has devised an ingenious way to eliminate these blind spots.

Alaina Gassler, a brilliant young mind from West Grove, Pennsylvania, showcased her idea at the Broadcom MASTERS competition for middle schoolers, organized by the Society for Science and the Public.

She built a relatively simple system out of a webcam, projector, and 3D-printed materials that projects the view from outside your vehicle onto the blind spots of your car. She titled her project "Improving Automobile Safety by Removing Blind Spots."

bacbddeecf
Source: Reddit

The whole thing basically gives you x-ray vision, and Gassler hopes that it will help drivers be safer on the road by giving them a more complete view of their surroundings.

baddef
Source: Reddit

Gassler's idea earned her first place in the nationwide competition, along with the $25,000 Samueli Foundation Prize for overall STEM excellence.

In an email to Mashable, Gassler explained how her innovative system works.

"She mounted the webcam outside the passenger side A-pillar on a car and then displayed the live video on the inside pillar from a projector attached to the sunroof above the driver's seat. She even had to print a special part to help focus the projector at such close range. She then faced issues with projecting the image on the interior frame. So she resurfaced it with retro reflective fabric."

She went on to explain in the email that the material "only reflects light back to the light source, which is the projector in this case. Since the driver's eyes are next to the projector, the driver can see a crisp, clear image, and the passengers only see a black piece of fabric.”

She replaced the material when she noticed that anyone not sitting in the driver's seat would get a headache from the distorted image. "During testing when I sat in the passenger seat of the car and the moving light from the projector gave me a headache," she said.

This article was originally published on November 1, 2019. It has since been updated.

inventionsteensscience

The Latest

Kitchen tongs that might have more uses than you realize.
Ideas

This TikToker’s kitchen tong hack makes awkward drive-thrus way easier

Celebrity tributes pour in for Val Kilmer after his passing​
Culture

Celebrity tributes pour in for Val Kilmer after his passing​

More For You

Planets aligned; boys looking through telescope

The next parade will be in 2040.

Photo credit: Canva

All seven planets in our solar system will appear in Earth's sky for one night

Standing under the night sky is breathtaking. As stars, tiny pools of light, poke through an endlessly dark blanket, we feel humbled and are reminded of our great luck: We are here, in this moment, right now, a product of everything that has come before and playing a role in everything that will come after.

Nights like these already feel like a small miracle. But on February 28th, something positively incredible happens: the 2025 planetary parade. Imagine stepping out on a clear February evening and seeing not just one or two, but SEVEN planets shining brightly in the distance like a string of cosmic jewels.

Keep ReadingShow less
a man running up a vertical wall, three images

A gravity-defying stunt

Photo credit: Canva and Zhang Yije

Chinese man uses physics to miraculously escape from a 20-foot pit

A video went viral on the Chinese social media platform Rednote, also known as Xiaohongshu. It features a man who appears trapped at the bottom of a colorful pit—until he begins to run. The walls are nearly vertical and at least four to five times taller than the man (approximately 20 feet high). Yet, he manages to climb out in ten seconds or less by consistently running in a perfectly timed circle.


Keep ReadingShow less
The Himalayas on a clear day.

The towering Himalayas may seem unshakable, but deep beneath them, the Earth is shifting in ways scientists never expected.

Vyacheslav Argenberg

Beneath the Himalayas, something unexpected is happening—and it could shake the world

The Himalayas, one of the most awe-inspiring mountain ranges on Earth, have long captured the imaginations of adventurers and scientists alike. Towering above the clouds, these colossal peaks hold not only breathtaking beauty but also crucial geological secrets. Recent research suggests something astonishing: the Indian tectonic plate—the very foundation of the Himalayas—may be splitting in two deep beneath the surface.

For millions of years, the Indian Plate has been pushing northward, colliding with the Eurasian Plate and giving rise to the Himalayas. But new findings from Stanford University geologist Simon L. Klemperer and his team indicate that this seemingly solid landmass is undergoing a dramatic transformation, one that could have significant implications for earthquakes and mountain stability in the region.

Keep ReadingShow less
Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev floating aboard the space station, holding a camcorder in microgravity, surrounded by equipment.

Sergei Krikalev aboard the space station, capturing moments while unknowingly becoming part of history.

NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

He orbited Earth over 5,000 times while his homeland disappeared beneath him

It’s the stuff of science fiction—a brave explorer launches into space, only to return and find the world radically changed. But for Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, this was no movie plot. It was real life.

When Krikalev left Earth in 1991, he was a proud citizen of the Soviet Union, embarking on what was supposed to be a routine five-month mission aboard the Mir space station. But as political upheaval shook his homeland, his return was repeatedly delayed. By the time he finally made it back 312 days later, the USSR had collapsed, his country had ceased to exist, and even his hometown had a different name.

Keep ReadingShow less
Scientists extracted a Pink Floyd song from brainwaves and it’s haunting
Representative photo by Canva

Scientists extracted a Pink Floyd song from brainwaves and it’s haunting

The concept of reading thoughts once belonged to the realm of science fiction, but breakthroughs in neural decoding are turning it into reality. This technology, which interprets brain activity into meaningful signals, has already allowed scientists to reconstruct words and images from brainwaves. Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have taken it a step further. In August 2023, they managed to recreate a Pink Floyd song purely from brain activity, a discovery published in PLOS Biology that offers new insight into how the brain processes music.

A team led by Robert Knight and Ludovic Bellier conducted the study on 29 epilepsy patients at Albany Medical Center in New York who were undergoing brain surgery. While the patients were in the operating room, they listened to "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1" by Pink Floyd. Electrodes placed directly on their brains recorded the electrical signals produced as they processed the song. Using artificial intelligence, Bellier later reconstructed the track based entirely on these neural recordings. The final result was hauntingly distorted yet unmistakably recognizable. "It sounds a bit like they’re speaking underwater, but it’s our first shot at this," Knight told The Guardian.

Keep ReadingShow less
© Copyright 2025