At left, the gear and garb of a Special Operations Forces soldier outfitted for serious cold. At right, a similar consumer ensemble. The difference—well, fortunately, it ain’t what it used to be. “Cotton kills” has been a truism of the outdoor world for decades, but the military is only now switching to synthetic base layers. The new gear—most of it belonging to the Personal Environmental Protective Survival Equipment (PEPSE) system—consists of ruggedized consumer tech.

When Panasonic Toughbooks go to war—the company is the leading supplier of ruggedized military laptops, with more than 10,000 computers deployed in Iraq—they must withstand being sprayed by saltwater, shaken by mortar fire, and run over by Humvees. Certification involves an intense gauntlet of dropping, dousing, cooking, cooling and shaking. “If you want to play in the rugged market, you have to meet or exceed these requirements,” says Jan O’Hara, Panasonic’s director of federal sales.

When a computer-aimed weapon is firing from a moving vehicle, it pretty much has to know exactly where it is at all times. Dragon Fire, a new mortar firing system being developed by the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, employs a GPS unit enhanced by a ring-laser gyroscope. The result is a weapon capable of unprecedented firepower—remotely initiated, controlled by a skeleton crew, and with pinprick accuracy.

Goose died. Goose died because Maverick couldn’t get the enemy plane into the 20-degree field-of-view of his head-up display (HUD) and thus couldn’t establish a radar lock to fire his missiles. True, the Stratocasters scream less sonorously in real-life fighter cockpits, but when it comes to dogfights, Top Gun gets it right: Position is everything. That’s why U.S. Air Force and Navy pilots using the new Joint Helmet-Mounted Cueing System (JHMCS) have such an advantage.

A century ago radioactivity was new, exciting and good for you—at least if you believed the people selling radium pendants for rheumatism, all-natural radon water for vigor, uranium blankets for arthritis and
thorium-laced medicine for digestion (you don't even want to know about the radioactive suppositories).

Quick, how many years will it be before the world runs out of oil? Don't know? Join the club. Actually, choose one of several clubs, each of which vehemently disagrees with the others on how much usable crude is left on the earth. The question is far from an academic exercise: This year oil hit a near record-high $40 a barrel, and Royal Dutch/Shell Group downgraded its reserves by 4.5
billion barrels.

Terrible, horrible things can be done to this millimeters-thick patch of shimmering material crafted by chemists at NanoSonic in Blacksburg, Virginia. Twist it, stretch it double, fry it to 200�C, douse it with jet fuel—the stuff survives. After the torment, it snaps like rubber back to its original shape, all the while conducting electricity like solid metal. “Any other material would lose its conductivity,” says Jennifer Hoyt Lalli, NanoSonic’s director of nanocomposites.

The starship Field Circus is racing through space on a seven-year journey to a brown dwarf three light-years from Earth and, if all goes well, a business meeting with an alien civilization from another universe. It’s around the year 2030, and there’s time to kill, so three crew members, Boris, Pierre and Su Ang, are sitting in the bar, a wood-paneled room modeled after a 300-year-old pub in Amsterdam. There’s a 16-page beer menu, but Boris has opted for a cocktail made of baby jellyfish. Pierre is angling for a sip when Donna the Journalist appears.

Your PDA tells you many things—the time of a meeting, the phone number of a colleague. It entertains with games and MP3s. But it does not tell you to step right to avoid a landmine. It does not tell you to pull the trigger. Not unless you are a Marine, that is, and the device is the D-DACT, a PDA the military hopes will do nothing less than take war into the wireless age. Instead of drifting dangerously out of touch, soldiers will be networked through D-DACT modems, which communicate over military radio frequencies.

Full Spectrum Warrior, a new videogame for the Xbox, feels real. The setting is the fictional locale of Zafarra, Zekistan, but it may as well be Baghdad, Iraq. You command two four-soldier infantry squads and are charged with securing neighborhoods and rescuing wounded comrades. Your men dash across dusty streets, slink along chipped walls, and launch grenades from behind overturned cars. Bullets fly. Bodies fall like rag dolls.