#2. Sonic Black Holes
Even at its most silent, our world is brimming with ambient burbles and murmurs. Now imagine the chaos that would unfold if one mad genius held all the sound in a major city hostage. Discotheques would shutter, Harley riders would cry tears of silent frustration, and stand-up comics everywhere would resort to miming and smashing watermelons with oversized mallets. Indeed, this is the dystopian reality Israeli scientists seem to be working toward with their sonic black hole.
Humans have made your standard, matter-gobbling black holes already, but those little bastards are difficult to manage. So to better understand these mysterious maelstroms of cosmic destruction, scientists decided to create a safer, more playful version.
"No, it's safe. We put a sign on it, see?"
By chilling 100,000 rubidium atoms and using lasers to create a whirlpool effect, scientists were able to create a sonic black hole from which no sound can escape. It apparently works just like a regular black hole, but for noise. It absorbs bits of sound -- or "phonons" -- just as a black hole eats photons.
So what possible use could this be in the real world? Well so far, scientists have only maintained the effect for a few milliseconds, and they plan to use this auditory abomination to study real black holes. This is because they have no imagination. Though, if someone built a device that devours all sound and they planned to use it to blackmail the world's richest teen pop idols, do you really think they'd admit it? Or even worse -- what if some dastard purloined this technology and trained ninjas with black holes strapped to their backs? The mind reels at the possibility.
Soon, men and women begin using them against each other. Within days, the entire planet is at peace.
#1. Painless, Undetectable Laser Injection
The best way to assassinate someone is to make it look like it's not an assassination at all. So good news, ninja of the future: The mad geniuses as MIT have created the hypospray from Star Trek. MIT's device pushes a "near-supersonic dose of medication straight through your skin into your body." The drugs are fired through the flesh on a blast of air smaller than the proboscis of a mosquito.
It's painless, doesn't leave a mark, and apparently you can unload this thing right into someone's eyeball or eardrum without any ill effects. All you need to do is bump into someone and BOOM. Faster than you can dramatically announce, "Hail HYDRA," rattlesnake venom is coursing into your victim's bloodstream.
Or, in a more likely application, a heavy dose of Viagra while your buddy is on a first date.
But with these types of devices, it can be hard to control the dosage and the potential for residual splash back. If you need a specific amount of chemicals to go to an exact depth in the flesh, then what you need is a laser needle. Scientists in South Korea have developed a laser-driven microjet injector that can launch a laser stream of medicine (or poison) directly into your body with precision.
Optics Letters via Science Daily
Explained here with this ... well, look, it's just dangerous.
The beam is about the size of a human hair, it's extremely accurate, and -- like any supervillain tech worth its salt -- it's a laser. Currently, the injector has to be pressed close to the skin, but a little more sinister R&D, we could be looking at a short-range injection gun. Assassins the world over will be able to shoot invisible, painless beams of toxins into their doomed targets at will. Also, babies won't cry so much when they get their shots! There's a silver lining to everything!
For more tips on supervillainy (or stamp collecting), check out Monte's blog.
For more weapons that are better suited for fiction, check out 6 New Weapons That Are Making War Look Like a Cartoon and 7 WTF Military Weapons You Won't Believe They Actually Built.