You are dangling like bait at the end of a 22-foot-long robotic arm, and it looks and feels exactly like you're zooming through space. It's tempting to gaze at distant planets, except that an asteroid as big as a house is hurtling toward you. Just before impact, you blast it with a phaser cannon while executing a series of buttery barrel rolls to avoid the debris. The asteroid bits pelt your ship, rattling you to the marrow. Then, without warning, you're sucked through the blackness of a wormholeback into reality.

Kaleidoscopic holograms like the ones stamped on your credit cards could soon wind up in the eyes of diabetics. Researchers at Smart Holograms in Cambridge, England, have devised a contact lens that changes shape in response to glucose found in tears—a direct indicator of blood sugar.

The Texas cattle-country town of Granbury (pop.: 5,718) is an ideal spot for weekend getaways. Located about 65 miles southwest of Dallas, it boasts a stone opera house built in 1886, a double-decker riverboat, a well-worn Jesse James legendeverything except regular airline service. But if an air-taxi demonstration in Danville, Virginia, this month goes as planned, tourists could soon be zipping in and out of Granbury as though it were Dallas.

1. Einstein showed that light travels in bundles called quanta, which are at
the heart of the light-emitting diode. When electrons in a semiconductor-based diode move from one side to another, they shift to a less excited state, releasing energy in the form of photons. Channel these, and you get a bright, long-lasting light source.

2. In 1917 Einstein demonstrated that when a photon comes into contact with an atom, it can trigger a chain-reaction release of additional photons from

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.