Distributed, decentralized power plants in or near homes and offices are coming back into fashion, hundreds of years after Thomas Edison first suggested the idea.

PARC researchers are working on a \'Polybot\' a robot made from a dozen or so identical modules. When ordered to do so by its operator, it changes shape on the move by rebuilding itself out of these modules.

In theory, quantum computers can do things ordinary computers cannot. In practice, a useful quantum computer is still a long way off.

The use of quantum mechanics to encrypt satellite messages may foil eavesdroppers and code-breakers for good.

Investors have suddenly started taking nanotechnology seriously. Will too much money, too quickly, spoil things?

A growing band of computer engineers and scientists are planning a set of software tools which, when combined with clever hardware, would let users tap processing power off the Internet as easily as electrical power can be drawn from the electricity grid. Many scientific problems that require truly massive amounts of computation?designing drugs from their protein blueprints, forecasting local weather patterns months ahead, simulating the airflow around an aircraft?could benefit hugely from this grid.

Instead of using the ones and zeros of digital electronics to simulate the way the brain functions, “neuromorphic” engineering relies on nature's biological short-cuts to make robots that are smaller, smarter and vastly more energy-efficient.

Certain types of satellites have started to shrink in size, cost and development time, making it possible for communities, companies, schools, hospitals—and, perhaps one day, even individuals—to have a satellite of their own.

New manufacturing processes, wireless technology and intelligent software are making sensors and tags ever smaller, smarter and, most important, cheaper. As with microprocessors and lasers in earlier decades, the novelty is not that these sensors exist at all, but that they have suddenly become cheap enough to be used in ordinary everyday products.

A lengthy introduction to the Global Positioning System with a focus on its history and impact as well as a lay introduction to how it works.