Life may or may not follow art, but science sometimes follows the movies. In Twister, a group of tornado chasers releases baseball-sized probes into a funnel cloud to gather violent weather data. Now, a research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge wants to send a swarm of orbs to Mars. Powered by a fuel cell, each probe would hop around the planet on spring-loaded legs or be dropped from above, allowing the balls to infiltrate Mars's most dangerous and hard-to-reach places.
