At 1,200 pounds and 14 feet long, "Troy" is chunkier than the average great white shark. He might smell kind of funny too. But do the pods of sharp-toothed predators he swam among last winter know that, inside, there's just a man? Or that it was Fabien Cousteau, grandson of pioneering undersea explorer Jacques, surreptitiously recording their every movement?

Natural light has a positive effect on human health. But skylights-our go-to source for delivering sunlight indoors-transmit heat, taxing your A/C system. Sunlight Direct (sunlight-direct.com) is testing a smarter approach: hybrid solar lighting (HSL). HSL captures direct sunlight while excluding heat-saturated infrared rays and uses optical fibers to channel it to indoor fixtures. On a sunny day, this system can transmit 50,000 lumens, enough to illuminate 1,000 square feet.

Renewing your passport soon? You may want to craft a tinfoil sleeve to store it in. That´s because the next generation of U.S. passports, set to hit travelers´ hands by September, will come with a radio transponder and a 64-kilobyte computer chip embedded in their back covers. The chip will store the same information that´s printed in your passport, and the transponder will broadcast it to a reader synced up to an inspector´s computer. IT´s part of a cover-to-cover passport overhaul to make the document harder to counterfeit.Why the tinfoil?

The quest to build the world´s most potent supercomputer is like a never-ending Olympic event, with the pride of entire nations at stake. This summer, the U.S. will tighten its grip on the gold when engineers at the Department of Energy´s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory boost the speed of IBM´s reigning champion Blue Gene/L to an anticipated 270 teraflops-a floor-shaking 270 trillion calculations per second.

A: You´ve probably heard of the Wi-Fi antennas made from old Pringles cans, but those are tricky to build and often require special connectors and soldering. A much easier option is a parabolic reflector antenna. You can whip one together using an old shoe box, tape and some aluminum foil in about 30 minutes, and it will double or triple the range (in a single direction) of just about any wireless access point with an external stick antenna.

Dept.: Gray Matter
Element: Gold
Project: Gilding
Cost: $60
Time: One hour
Dabbler | | | | | Master

Dept.: Geek Guide
Tech: Mac Mini projects
Cost: $500 and up
Time: One hour and up
Dabbler | | | | | Master

The key to the thrill ride of the future is a robotic arm that replaces the traditional roller-coaster car. British engineer Gino De-Gol adapted the Kuka KR 500, a 5,000-pound aluminum robotic arm, by attaching a passenger seat to the free end. The arm has six joints that allow it to articulate acrobatics as wild as a programmer can dream up. To make his RoboCoaster a reality, De-Gol needs to build a track that can handle the cantilevered load of the KR 500. Here´s a video of the arm in action:

Accompanying the Vex Robotics kit, featured in this month’s What’s New section [page 24], is the Vex Robotics Design System’s Inventor’s Guide. The guide is more than just a stapled pamphlet with instructions on how to build a cookie-cutter robot. It introduces and explains basic engineering concepts relating to the Vex system, penned under direction from the Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

Making the switch from a Windows PC to a Mac isn´t nearly as daunting as it might seem. Most of your files, including photos, music and Microsoft Office documents, will open on your Mac without any conversion (although you will need to buy the Mac version of Microsoft Office). And Mac OS X´s interface is pretty intuitive (just remember: Finder is the Mac equivalent to Window´s Explorer).