The short answer, says Steen Rasmussen of Los Alamos National Laboratory, is that “nobody has a freakin’ clue.” But it isn’t for lack of trying. During the past century, scientists have kicked around all kinds of theories to explain how a bunch of inanimate primordial molecules on the early Earth turned into what some scientists affectionately refer to as FLO (“first living organism”). Now, in an attempt to retrace those chemical steps, Rasmussen and other investigators are trying to cook up their own simple artificial organisms in the lab.

Although experts debate the ease of building a crude nuclear bomb, no one disputes that it is far easier to build a simpler weapon known as a dirty bomb—a conventional bomb that scatters radioactive material. A dirty bomb produces no nuclear chain reaction, no mushroom cloud. Yet its aftereffects could be devastating. In a 2002 computer simulation run by the Federation of American Scientists, a single foot-long piece of radioactive cobalt of the type commonly used in food-irradiation plants was blown up with TNT in lower Manhattan.

Unfortunately, the only way to get the Media Center Edition of Windows is to buy a new computer, but it’s simple and inexpensive to add any or all of the key benefits—the large-type 10-foot menus, remote control and TV-recording capability—to an existing desktop or laptop computer with one of these aftermarket add-ons. (If you’d like to create a PC from scratch that has these features, see “Build Your Own HTPC” in How 2.0.)

Microsoft has minimum requirements for the specs on a PC running Media Center Edition 2005, but the minimum would make for a pretty weak machine. That said, not all components need to be top-of-the-line to turn a PC into a digital-media powerhouse. Unless you’re into processor- and video-intensive tasks such as gaming or video editing, don’t pay extra for stuff you won’t use. Direct your dough instead at things like storage and RAM, where more is always better.

As your media collection grows from bite-size to terabyte-size, it’s easy to run out of hard-drive space. Adding internal or external drives to a PC is simple enough, but what if you want several computers in your home to have access to the files? The ideal solution is network-attached storage, or NAS. As the name implies, NAS consists of one or more hard drives connected to your router and available to any computer on the network. Unlike a shared drive on one of the PCs, files on NAS are accessible no matter which computers are running.

Last fall, the race to stop terrorists from acquiring a nuclear bomb passed through Tashkent, Uzbekistan. There, on the morning of September 19, a Russian Antonov 12 cargo plane touched down carrying two nearly indestructible steel canisters. Under the watch of elite security forces armed with machine guns, Uzbek officials unloaded the canisters and drove them to a remote, wooded area about 20 miles from the Central Asian capital.

One of the strongest points of Media Center Edition 2005 is that you’re not limited to the Microsoft’s built-in functionality, such as photos, music, etc. In fact, dozens of third-party plug-ins for the OS exist and more are being built all the time. Under the Online Spotlight menu, you can find extra downloadable or streaming content from providers such as ESPN and Napster—these come ready to go out of the box, and Microsoft will automatically add more through software updates.

Media Center laptops fall into the increasingly popular category of desktop replacements: seven-pound-plus big-screen beasts that will rarely, if ever, sit on your lap. Why go with a laptop if it’s not going to hit the road?

The philosopher Karl Popper is fast becoming the best-known loser in modern intellectual history. Three years ago, in the book Wittgenstein’s Poker, which recounts a famous battle between Popper and his contemporary, Ludwig Wittgenstein, authors David Edmonds and John Eidinow clearly gave the latter the upper hand. Now, in Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science (Columbia University Press, $24), Steve Fuller recounts Popper’s debate with the Harvard physicist turned historian

Apparently, a few people at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory forgot to turn on their crackpot detectors. The lab-commissioned “Teleportation Physics Study,” which was recently released on the Federation of American Scientists Web site, makes for some of the most inane and entertaining