It's a good time to be an Angeleno. Kind of. In the September issue of Geology, USC earth scientists report that the Los Angeles basin is experiencing some seismic downtime. The scientists say that heavy seismic activity alternates between this LA area and the Mojave Desert, and the latter is currently in the middle of a hectic period. Los Angeles, by contrast, is going through a lull characterized by smaller, infrequent quakes.

But what these scientists mean by small might not make sense to anyone who experienced the devastating Northridge earthquake in 1994. According to the authors, the current lull has been in effect for 1,000 years, and the severity of the earthquakes that would occur in an active phase would be far more damaging than the Northridge event. These calm periods generally last about 1,500 to 2,000 years. So, if you're looking to buy in LA, play it safe, and don't plan on staying more than a few hundred years.—Gregory Mone

This isn't a road in the sense that it has a name or can be found on a map. It's just a trail covered with boulders and potholes superimposed on an inhospitable stretch of the Mojave Desert 25 miles south of Las Vegas. You wouldn't dream of driving over it in a car. Even in a Jeep or a kick-ass 4x4, you'd crawl along in low gear, wincing at the toll it was taking on your tires, suspension and kidneys.

Alan Pflueger flies along it at 98 miles an hour. And that's not "flying" used figuratively. He's getting air under the tires of his two-and-a-half-ton truck as he vaults over crests and crashes into gullies with a giant plume of dust streaming in his wake. Pflueger's flying machine is a purpose-built racing leviathan known as a Trophy-Truck. Created to conquer the Baja 1000, the world's toughest off-road race, Trophy-Trucks cross the gnarliest terrain on the continent at speeds that can exceed 140 mph. Almost anything goes in this unlimited class, from 800-horsepower V8 engines to state-of-the-art electronics to titanium springs the size of laser-guided missiles. "Trophy-Trucks are the most complicated and sophisticated race vehicles in existence," says former Nissan Motorsports chief Frank Honsowetz, who should know; his experience encompasses Baja, the Indy 500 and Le Mans.

Early next year, dozens of huge, concave mirrors will begin to sprout on a desert farm northeast of Los Angeles. Each 37-foot-diameter Stirling dish will electronically track the sun and reflect its rays onto a heat collector, where the concentrated sunlight will superheat hydrogen to 1,300�F, driving an electric generator by Stirling engine. Once the world´s largest solar-energy farm is completed, some 20,000 dishes will stretch over 4,500 acres of the Mojave Desert, producing power for up to 278,000 homes.

The year opened with a presidential commitment to space unrivaled since John F. Kennedy's vow to put a man on the moon: In January, George W. Bush promised not only to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 but also to use it as a testing ground for possible "human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond." His directive came less than a year after the Columbia disaster grounded NASA's human-spaceflight program.

A tiny blue-and-white rocket plane glides 44,000 feet above the Mojave Desert. Test pilot Brian Binnie, wearing a helmet and a navy blue flight suit, is focused on the cockpit’s digital instrument display, stealing only quick glances out the vehicle’s 18 little round windows. With the flip of a switch, he fires the rocket motor, igniting nitrous oxide and rubber. The effect is instantaneous and violent: Binnie gets slammed with four Gs as his craft shoots forward like a Sidewinder missile.

On June 21, Burt Rutan's innovative manned rocket, SpaceShipOne, touched down in the Mojave Desert after a historic trip into suborbital space. Pilot Mike Melvill flew the rocket to 328,491 feet, just barely punching out of the atmosphere. After touchdown, as the craft was being towed before a crowd of 27,000 spectators, newly crowned astronaut Melvill sat astride his spaceship holding a sign that read "SpaceShipOne, GovernmentZero."

If the flight does indeed mark the beginning of nongovernment-supported spaceflight, what comes next?

Aerospace engineer David Graham and his three colleagues had a deadline, and a little brown tortoise was putting it in jeopardy. In a few hours, as the sun rose over the Mojave Desert on an August morning last year, two Northrop Grumman F-5E fighter jets would come racing over the horizon. Flying 30,000 feet above Harper Dry Lake and traveling at 920 mph, the airplanes would be trailing long sonic boomsthe distinctive aural signatures of supersonic flight that ordinarily make high-speed passages over land impossible.

DARPA ultimately cares little about the fate of civilian robots in the Mojave Desert. Yet it cares very much about the development of new robot technology, technology that will enable unmanned vehicles to autonomously monitor their surroundings, avoid boulders and potholes, and race to targets. By those criteria, the race did have a winner: Digital Auto Drive of Morgan Hill, California, which developed an innovative new robot vision system that, team leaders claim, nearly won them the race.

When last we visited with the men and women, the boys and girls, the Red Teams and Blue Teams and Road Warriors of the DARPA Grand Challenge off-road robotics race, back in March, we signed off on a note of authentic ambivalence. The teams themselves were all over the map, from rehearsing victory speeches to praying they would pass the qualifying round and be allowed on to what was anticipated to be a 210-mile course from outside Los Angeles through the Mojave Desert to somewhere just west of Vegas.

The pilot of the Beech Bonanza 3,000 feet above us had never seen anything like it: a 747 with a bizarrely swollen engine buzzing the Mojave Desert at 300 feet. The control tower eased his fearsit's just GE's Flying Testbedbut aboard the jumbo jet I was a bit nervous. For 10 minutes we got no higher than 400 feet, at nearly 300 mph, powered by one engine.