Going into battle, the captain notes from the bridge that the crosswind has picked up, and he has a word with his officer of the deck. The OOD issues an order to the young helmsman. The helmsman turns the wood-spoked wheel to the right, and the boatswain picks up his silver
whistle and alerts the crew. A seaman plots the change of course on a large paper chart with a straightedge and pencil, noting the time. Below, in sight of the captain, hundreds of crewmembers ready the ship's weapons for a fight.

Here is the future of cancer treatment as Naomi Halas sees it. During a cancer screening, your physician injects a gold-laden liquid into your bloodstream and shines an invisible light over your body for roughly 30 seconds. She turns to a computer monitor that displays a precision map of the size, shape and location of a newly budding tumor. The treatment? A hardier blast of the same invisible light. By the time you're back in your car, the growth is history.

The gateway to the future of gene therapy is a hole 1 inch in diameter. Through the hole -- drilled into the skull of Nathan Klein, a Parkinson's disease patient with a shuffling gait and tremors that couldn't be quieted through conventional treatment -- Dr. Michael Kaplitt recently inserted 3.5 billion viral particles. The infusion, he believes, will deliver into brain cells
a gene that will correct the chemical imbalance that sparks Parkinson's symptoms.

Not enough giggles in your life?

A funny thing happened at New York's Belleayre ski resort in September 1965: A man launched himself into the sky with a parachute. The man was David Barish, a NASA aeronautical engineer who, a year earlier, had conceived a parachute for bringing Apollo spacecraft back to Earth. By adjusting a few key elements in its design to make it suitable for human flight, and then testing it himself, Barish unwittingly became the grandfather of a sport that thousands of flat-footed, gravity-challenged, slightly crazed humans now call paragliding.

"What's to be afraid of?" my gliding instructor, Bruce Stein, asks. "The worst thing that could happen in a powered aircraft already has: There's no engine. But you're still going to fly."

The moment is here--I'm going to fly. The runway's heavily skid-marked surface extends for a mile in front of me, then stops dead. Beyond it is ... well, infinity, and all the airborne thrills and adventures it has to offer. But infinity begins with trees, houses, hills and countless other obstacles that don't interact well with airplanes. Staring down the tarmac, sitting at the
controls for the first time, I wonder if my instructor has any idea of how bad I'm going to be at this.

Maybe it's that the minuscule plane I'm flying is almost entirely obscured by just two sets of legs (mine and my instructor's). Maybe it's that not a pane of glass or sheaf of steel separates us from the sky beyond. Or maybe it's simply the glaring lack of aeronautical controls in what passes for the cockpit. Whatever the reason, I can't believe this bare-bones contraption stays aloft, or that I'm the one flying it.

Boeing and others are working on the canard rotor/wing VTOL concept. The rotor spins for vertical takeoff, then converts to a fixed wing for forward flight, ideal for the air taxi systems predicted to launch in the 21st century. To render photo-quality illustrations of aviation concepts for this issue, we turned to The Embassy, a video-effects firm. Here's how visions of the future are engineered.

October 23, 2003—London. Around the world on a single tank of gas has been done. Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager accomplished the feat in 1986, flying Burt Rutan's brilliant propeller-driven Voyager aircraft. It was a gruelling nine-day ordeal for the duo, and it stretched aviation technology to its limits.

But Richard Branson and Steve Fossett think they can push the technology even further, and today the pair unveiled their plans to go one better—flying solo, and in only a third the time.