Supercomputing speeds continue to rise, with yesterday's fastest machines buried by today's speed kings, but when will supercomputers reach their limits? Most experts agree that current barriers to supercomputing speeds -- which are approaching hundreds of teraflops -- will fall. A teraflop equals 1 trillion floating point operations per second.

Researchers are developing portable ultrawideband radar units for the U.S. military that will allow soldiers to see through walls, or 'x-ray vision'. The technology may be used in a conflict with Iraq to help the military locate hidden bunkers and nuclear installations.

Researchers have created a primordial soup that works like a digital DNA factory, where T-shaped "codons" swim in a computer-generated virtual liquid forming single, double, and even triple strands. Like DNA, these digital particles "can be assembled into patterns that encode" information, claims robotics scientist Peter Turney. Given sufficient time, a soup of separated individual particles will "spontaneously form self-replicating patterns."