Two months ago, at the Texas State Fair, inventor Paul Moller displayed his Skycar, a vertical takeoff-and-landing craft with a cockpit seating four and four nacelles that house eight rotary engines.

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The system was established as a trade-off that provides a public benefit: the state agrees to grant a limited monopoly to an inventor in return for disclosing how the technology works.

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Konstantin Likharev, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a co-inventor of the single-electron transistor, is working on ways to combine it with conventional transistors to make super-dense memory chips.

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