8.5 Pounds the average U.S. adult male weight increased, 1991 to 2000


170 Pounds the FAA assumed an average male passenger weighed,
1938 to 2003


184 Pounds the FAA currently expects an average male passenger to weigh, according to an August 2004 revision of weight assumptions


14.8 billion Gallons of jet fuel consumed by domestic air travel in 2000


350 million Gallons that could have been spared in 2000 if the average
U.S. adult weight remained at 1991 average

Since the publication of Frankenstein in 1818, the architects of science fiction have mused over the implications of man-made (or man-muddled) life. Outcomes vary from Blade Runner-style mayhem to worlds inhabited by harmonious puddles of gray cellular goo, but there’s a common theme: When we tinker with the natural order, something always goes wrong. In Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, an entrepreneur dreams of an amusement park but instead unleashes a race of bloodthirsty carnivores.

Look around the Web and you’ll find countless how-to articles for building a media PC or home theater PC (HTPC) for as little money as possible. And those stories are not wrong: just about any computer with a TV tuner card and the right software can serve as an HTPC. In fact, it’s not a bad way to re-purpose an old machine—the processor requirements for most of the living room tasks are not heavy, especially with a tuner card that handles the encoding onboard instead of pawning it off to the main processor.

“This textbook contains material on
evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with
an open mind, studied carefully, and
critically considered.”

In 2002, officials in Cobb County, Georgia, slapped the above disclaimer
on biology textbooks after more than 2,000 parents protested that evolution was being treated as a fact, not a theory. The American Civil Liberties Union
and the parents of five students filed a lawsuit in response, stating that the

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.