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The rainbow ball of plastic hinges that fit in two hands and, with a pull, bloomed to the size of a beach ball. Chuck Hoberman's 1995 toy version of his expanding geodesic sphere lived in every science-museum gift shop and hung, motorized and enormous, in the museums themselves.
Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, two special-effects veterans and a crash-test dummy named Buster, testing urban legends with real experiments and — whenever remotely possible — explosions. MythBusters was every 2000s science class's reward day, and it convinced a generation that engineering was cooler than anything in the textbook.