Drop the sailor´s cap and put on some racing goggles. With its new Inboard Performance System (IPS), Volvo Penta is boosting the comfort and white-knuckle fun of yachting. Volvo engineers built

Robert Bigelow’s vision for commercial space travel includes more than a mere orbital hotel. The Las Vegas hotel magnate sees the designs featured in our March issue as adaptable to both a lunar exploration vehicle and a corporate space yacht. The “moon cruiser” would use a single inflatable module to generate more room on the multi-week voyages than the Apollo astronauts could dream of, and a smaller module would allow entry into a next-generation lunar lander for visits to the lunar surface.

It’s going to take a lot more than A Ford Econoline to deliver guests to the door of a space hotel. That’s why Robert Bigelow has established America’s Space Prize. Like the Ansari X Prize that Burt Rutan’s suborbital SpaceShipOne claimed last October, the Space Prize has simple rules. The craft must reach a 250-mile orbit twice in 60 days and demonstrate its ability to dock with a Bigelow module, and the second flight must carry five crew and passengers. No government funding is permitted, and only U.S. companies may enter. The deadline is January 10, 2010.

On the Las Vegas Strip, home of the biggest and most extravagant hotels in the world, shell-shocked tourists file past one stunningly ostentatious display after another. In the desert city, water says wealth like nothing else, and there’s a lake of it in front of the Bellagio, with fountains blasting 240 feet in the air in time to Broadway show tunes. Just up the street, the Mirage demonstrates that it has money to burn with a fiery volcano erupting from the top of a 119,000-gallon waterfall.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone here. Bill Gates studied here (before dropping out). The sewing machine, vulcanized rubber, the Polaroid camera, the microwave oven, artificial limbs, synthetic penicillin, the first computers, Arpanet, e-mail, inertial guidance systems—all are products of Boston ingenuity. Not so surprising when you consider that the city boasts more than 60 colleges and universities.

In San Jose, the unofficial capital of Silicon Valley, technology companies employ more than 300,000 people—practically a third of the populace. The city generates 30 percent more patents than its closest competitor (Boise, Idaho, home to Micron) and receives more than a third of the nation’s venture capital: $5 billion. Headquartered in Silicon Valley are Google, eBay and Cisco Systems; the world’s leading biotech company, Genentech, is up the road.

In Seattle, it seems, citizens have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of connectivity. The most wired (and wireless) city in the nation, Seattle has 57 Wi-Fi hotspots per 100,000 people; the national average is more like 18. A full 83 percent of Seattle homes have at least one computer, and almost all those homes are online, surpassing the national average by 21 percent.

Click here for the alphabetized list with overall rank and 6 subcategories

To determine which U.S. cities can claim the designation “high-tech,” we chose 36 technology indicators—our raw data—based on expert and staff opinion. Items such as “robotic surgery,” “number of Wi-Fi hotspots” and “R&D budgets at local universities” all qualified.

THE SUPERMARKET

Charlotte, NC
At Food Lion’s new pilot store, Bloom, shoppers get an RFID scanner along with their cart and total up their groceries on the go. Changed your mind about the frozen pizza? Just press “delete” and your tally will automatically adjust. Can’t find your favorite marinade? Stop at one of Bloom’s eight information stations and get a map pinpointing your item’s location. Paying at the self-service checkout takes about 60 seconds.

THE PLANETARIUM

At the height of World War I, nature unleashed the most effective bioweapon ever known. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed more than 20 million people. Then it disappeared, leaving behind corpses and lingering anxieties. Why was this particular flu so severe? Would it recur? Could we stop it if it did?