He's 6 feet 8, 650 pounds, and he's got 40 different moves. If Universal Studios Orlando's new animatronic mummy ever plays ball, make sure he's on your team. The creature is the namesake of the $80 million Revenge of the Mummy thrill ride, which opened in May. Built of thousands of parts that are articulated by 1,000 feet of 4,000psi hydraulic tubing, the robot has four times the technical agility of state-of-the-art animatronics. All this equipment goes toward mimicking the countless motions that make up human movement.

DARPA ultimately cares little about the fate of civilian robots in the Mojave Desert. Yet it cares very much about the development of new robot technology, technology that will enable unmanned vehicles to autonomously monitor their surroundings, avoid boulders and potholes, and race to targets. By those criteria, the race did have a winner: Digital Auto Drive of Morgan Hill, California, which developed an innovative new robot vision system that, team leaders claim, nearly won them the race.

When last we visited with the men and women, the boys and girls, the Red Teams and Blue Teams and Road Warriors of the DARPA Grand Challenge off-road robotics race, back in March, we signed off on a note of authentic ambivalence. The teams themselves were all over the map, from rehearsing victory speeches to praying they would pass the qualifying round and be allowed on to what was anticipated to be a 210-mile course from outside Los Angeles through the Mojave Desert to somewhere just west of Vegas.

Tech: Homemade arcade
Cost: $50 to $800
Time: 20 to 40 hours
Space Invaders. Battlezone. Pac-Man. Donkey Kong. Mortal Kombat. Anyone who spent a geeky adolescence haunting loud, dimly lit arcades knows that playing those games on a PC just isn´t the same-a keyboard is a poor replacement for a joystick, and most PCs don´t stand up to even a single full body slam.
So Tim Eckel, a self-employed systems analyst, devised a compromise.

Last year, camera cellphones were something of a novelty. Their optical sensors captured VGA-quality stills at best (that's about half a megapixel), so the resulting shots were destined to live in the digital realm. This summer, 1-megapixel combos capable of producing album-worthy 3-by-5-inch prints hit stores. One-hour photo outlets are capitalizing: Already you can point your 1MP mobile at a wireless, digital photo kiosk and—like that!—print your snapshots.

For purists, duct tape will always be gray, ugly and indestructible. For the rest of us, 3M has developed a colorless version of the almighty adhesive. Over the last year, the company has quietly introduced "clear" duct tape that works just like the old stuff. The new tape has a "scrim" of white embedded fibers, so it tears crossways and lengthwise, just like regular duct tape. And while it's not exactly invisible, it is inconspicuous for minor repairs. According to 3M, the hard part was developing a see-through adhesive: most tapes use natural rubber, which isn't transparent.

"I know these patients better than anyone on the floor right now," asserts critical-care specialist Dr. Joseph T. Cooke, who's checking up on 38 ICU patients at New York-Presbyterian hospital—from across the street. Welcome to the electronic ICU, where bedside manner means ringing a doorbell before observing patients via video camera, then checking vital signs on four remotely located monitors. Surreal?

As the cruiser powers into an enemy harbor the captain, suspecting mines, unleashes a swarm of microbes into the water. By the trillions they sniff out TNT, fluorescing brighter hues of red as they near their quarry and then digest the explosive, rendering it harmless.

They sit on a spur of test track outside General Electric’s locomotive factory in Erie, Pennsylvania, panting and grumbling like two old lions half asleep. The ominous, muttering rumble is the sound of 8,800 horsepower at idle—24 cylinders with pistons big as buckets, turbochargers the size of washing machines, two V12 engines direct-driving alternators five feet in diameter.

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.