Kids get cavities. Dentists fill them. It's a fairly old arrangement, but it may soon come to an end if cavities go the way of smallpox. Jeffrey Hillman's company, Oragenics, has patented a simple swab of bacteria that when wiped across a set of teeth will (allegedly) grant a lifetime of protection from tooth decay. By this fall, Hillman, a dental researcher at the University of Florida, will begin testing the new strain on 15 to 30 volunteers.

You may have to wait a decade or two for your garage to automatically diagnose your car's ills, but the array of technology below only seems futuristic. It's quite possible today to demystify the Check Engine light on your car's dashboard and schedule your lawnmower to trim your yard automatically. Here's how to do all that and more.

My carefully wrapped Christmas present in 1998 was a $4.95 issue of Hemmings Motor News , the thick, pulp-paper monthly classified listing of collector cars. Even if it carries a 21st-century date, each issue still looks like something you'd find on the toilet tank of a 1950s Sinclair station restroom in Tucumcari, New Mexico. So was this a cheesy gift from my wife? Hardly.

In 1998, the Volkswagen Group bought Rolls-Royce and its subsidiary marque Bentley for $750 million, after a fierce bidding war with BMW. Months later, it was revealed that for $65 million, BMW had made an end run and snookered away the rights to the Rolls-Royce name—arguably the only valuable asset in the whole deal.


All VW ended up owning after spending so much was a Bronze Age Rolls/Bentley factory in Crewe, England, and the second-rate—in many eyes—Bentley brand (what were Bentleys, other than stealth Rollses with different grilles?).

Whenever Maria Chudnovsky gets her car fixed, she feels uneasy. Did the mechanic really discern the problem, or did he just tinker until the symptoms vanished? “How do I know,” she says, “that in 15 minutes it won’t break again?”

Chudnovsky, 27, yearns to understand the world completely. Why do storm clouds appear before it rains? Why do we catch cold? What was really wrong with her car?

A note to the reader: Certain scenes in the following account have been dramatized, Hollywood-style—entirely made up—but the description of the film, the scientific information and all the quotes are real.

Act 1: HOLLYWOOD

INT. MOVIE THEATER—NIGHT OF MAY 28, 2004

Don’t call it cold fusion. Not yet. For the second time in two years, physicist Rusi Taleyarkhan and colleagues claim to have created a miniature sun in a jar, but this time skeptics are taking a closer look.

Water take heed: Liquids are now at the mercy of a breakthrough material from Bell Labs. Flip an electric switch and the material acts like a sponge. Flip again and it behaves like a rain slicker. Applications could turn up wherever liquids meet solids (read: practically everywhere). Lead researcher Tom Krupenkin envisions near-frictionless torpedoes, self-cleaning windshields and more efficient batteries.

When General Motors and Toyota yanked the plug on their electric-vehicle programs last year, citing high costs and weak demand, many proud owners of gas-guzzlers no doubt nodded smugly: Batteries are for flashlights, not family cars.

If Behrokh Khoshnevis has his way, the on-demand world of movies, TV, Internet connections, you name it, will have a home under on-demand roofs. Khoshnevis, a University of Southern California professor, says he’s a year away from essentially printing out a house from computer-generated blueprints wired to an apparatus that works like a giant inkjet printer. In this case, the printout is 3-D: An overhead gantry moves back and forth while an attached robotic nozzle oozes layer after layer of cement shaped by two automated trowels.