Behind an unmarked door in a faded business park outside Kelowna, British Columbia, in a maze of rooms crowded with desks, computers, and floor-to-ceiling shelves, Chuck Fipke sifts through 20-pound bags of dirt.

"We take samples, hey, from gravel and streambeds all over the world," Fipke says. He sieves the earth, runs it through magnetic drums and centrifuges and electromagnetic separators. Then his technicians, working with scanning electron microscopes, separate out grains and mount them on postage-stamp-sized squares of epoxy. It's painstaking work but worth the trouble. Fipke has learned to understand those grains of dirt, and that understanding has led him to diamonds.

Eighteen years ago, there was no such thing as a Canadian diamond — as far as anyone knew. Diamonds came mostly from Australia, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Russia. De Beers mined 75 percent of the world's output, much of it tainted by controversial "blood diamonds," sold to fund African wars.

Today, Canada is the world's third-largest producer, by value, of rough stones. In the Northwest Territories, BHP Billiton's Ekati mine has been producing since 1998 and Rio Tinto's Diavik mine since 2003. De Beers opened its first Canadian mine, at Snap Lake, in July — a confirmation that Canada is the new center of the world.

The story behind the addition of Canada to the ranks of diamond-producing nations leads back to one man: a short, absentminded Canadian geologist named Chuck Fipke. When he discovered diamonds in Lac de Gras, Northwest Territories, in 1991, he started the largest staking rush in North America since George Carmack found gold in the Klondike a century earlier. And he's not finished: He's prospecting around the world, toting gravel samples back to his lab in British Columbia to figure out where to look for his next big strike.

In 1970, fresh out of the University of British Columbia with a degree in geology, Chuck Fipke signed on with mining company Kennecott Copper to look for gold and copper in Papua New Guinea. A helicopter would drop him off alone in the middle of a jungle, and pick him up at the end of the day. The terrain was so rough that the chopper often couldn't land — Fipke would just leap out as it hovered close to the ground. One day he turned around to face 20 locals, arrows strung. He raised his arms, slowly removed his vest, and offered it to "the one who looked like the chief." By the time the helo returned for him, Fipke was in his underpants clutching a fine array of tribal shields, bows and arrows, and fetishes. "I've got an amazing collection of stuff!" he says.

Fipke is a small man with a shaved head, a burnished tan, piercing blue eyes, and forearms like Popeye's. As a kid, his frantic start-stop mind made people think he was stupid. After getting his high school girlfriend pregnant, he agreed to marry her ... and then failed to show up for the wedding. (The couple eventually married after the baby was born.) He stutters and says "hey" in almost every sentence. He frequently loses his glasses and his keys, shows up late to appointments, and has a history of spending prodigious amounts of money in strip joints. His nicknames have included Captain Chaos and Stumpy.

After stints in the Amazon, Australia, and South Africa, Fipke opened a mineral separation laboratory in British Columbia in 1977. A year later, Superior Oil hired him to go back into the field — to look not for metals but gems.

The company already had a search method. A couple of years prior, a geologist named John Gurney, working with Superior's money at the University of Cape Town, hypothesized that certain common minerals might reliably form alongside diamonds. He used an electron microprobe to analyze geological structures called kimberlite pipes — the places you occasionally (but not often) find diamonds — and discovered that the presence of chromite, ilmenite, and high-chrome, low-calcium garnet did indeed predict a rich strike. He examined a host of pipes in South Africa that had these so-called indicator minerals and published a paper explaining his results.

Fipke heard about Gurney's work on a tour of De Beers' Finsch Mine in South Africa and quickly turned himself into an expert on indicator minerals — combining what he understood of Gurney's work with results coming out of Russian labs and his own skills with field sampling. Superior had worked with Fipke before, back in his gold mining days, so by the time the company wanted someone to go look for kimberlite pipes northwest of Fort Collins, Colorado, Fipke was the best choice. He found half a dozen, but like 98 percent of the kimberlite formations in the world, they didn't contain diamonds in commercially viable quantities.

But Fipke knew that, 100 miles under those pipes, was a craton, a thick, old chunk of continental plate where diamonds form. Kimberlite pipes are created when magma bubbles up through a craton, expanding and cooling on its way up. If the craton has diamonds in it, the result is either a carrot-shaped, diamond-studded pipe reaching up to the surface or a wide, flat underground structure called a dike.

Fipke also knew that the craton underneath the pipes he had found ran all the way up the Rockies. With Superior's backing, he teamed up with a geologist and pilot named Stewart Blusson, formed Dia Met Minerals, and headed north.

By 1981, the two men were sampling the ground in Canada; they would eventually secure mining concessions on 80,000 square miles. "It was just me and Sewart and a floatplane," Fipke says. "We took all the supplies and all the samples in ourselves."

De Beers geologists, it turned out, were already there, relying on their own indicator mineral formulas. But Fipke and Blusson surmised that the indicators De Beers found had in fact been dragged far from the kimberlite pipe eons ago by a passing glacier. What they needed to do was look "upstream" for the point of origin. Fipke got a helicopter and flew back and forth over the Arctic Circle, using a magnetometer to track variations in magnetic field that would suggest kimberlite. After thousands of miles and hundreds of hours in the air, he found a promising site near Lac de Gras, a barren world of lakes and rock and muskeg a few hundred miles outside the Arctic Circle.

He'd been surveying for eight years. He hadn't found a single diamond. Superior had abandoned the diamond business. Dia Met's stock was trading at pennies a share. But based upon a few samples, Fipke estimated a diamond concentration at Lac de Gras of more than 60 carats per 100 tons — with about a quarter of the stones of good quality or better. (In kimberlite pipes that have gem-quality stones in commercial quantities, a concentration of 1 carat — 0.2 grams — per 100 tons can be profitable.) After six months of sampling, Fipke went public. It was 1991, and he had found a kimberlite pipe (buried under 30 feet of glaciated sediment) with a concentration of 68 carats per 100 tons — the first Canadian diamonds ever found. Shares of Dia Met rocketed to $70. Fipke had partnered with mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary Company (now BHP Billiton) to get the diamonds out; BHP opened the Ekati mine at Lac de Gras in 1998. Soon Dia Met's 29 percent share of the mine was worth billions. Fipke would go on to sell his chunk to BHP for $687 million, retaining 10 percent ownership in the mine, worth another $1 billion.

Today Canada's diamond business is soaring. The country's four working mines produced 17 million carats in 2007, up 23 percent from 2006. Diamonds from Canada now account for 10 percent of all diamonds by carat sold in the world. And the addition of more diamonds to the global market hasn't driven prices down. Average carat value has actually risen 15 percent, and the gems from the far north are untainted by the bad publicity that comes from an association with African wars.

Shortly before Fipke sold most of his Ekati claim to BHP Billiton, his marriage, faltering for years after so much time in the field, fell apart. At the time it was the largest divorce settlement in Canadian history. "Cost me $200 million, hey," Fipke says. "Best money I ever spent!"

Fipke now has mining projects in Morocco, Greenland, Canada, Angola, and Brazil. His laboratory bookshelves are heavy with mineral guides — and the family histories of thoroughbreds. Besides diamonds, he's now obsessed with horse racing. "It's a huge challenge, hey, and I like challenges even if they're risky," he says. "And I think I'm really going to do spectacularly well with horses." So far, so good: He has more than 50 brood mares in Ireland and Kentucky and 20 racehorses all over the world. His horse Tale of Ekati placed fifth in this year's Kentucky Derby. "I always go to the Derby with Bo Derek," he says, unlocking the door to a windowless room piled with maps and electron microscopes and computers. "She's a good rider, and she knows horses. And she's a lot of fun, hey! I'm gonna do for horse racing what I did for diamonds!"

Whether or not Fipke actually turns out to have an eye for horseflesh, his eye for the characteristics of crystals is unparalleled. He shows me rooms of glass flasks and tubes, the equipment for analyzing all those gravel samples. I peek through a microscope and see a rainbow treasure of sparkling gems: green chrome diopsides and red garnets — the low-calcium, high-chrome G-10s that mean diamonds are nearby.

Over many years in the field and the lab, Fipke has refined his understanding of this unique stew of minerals. "Everyone now knows that G-10 garnets with low calcium might lead you to diamonds, hey," Fipke says. "But how do you distinguish between a Group 1 eclogitic garnet that grew with a diamond and a Group 2 eclogitic garnet that didn't? They look the same." Custom software compares the grains' shapes and chemical compositions, analyzes them against 1,000 minerals that are intergrown with diamonds, and compares them against 10 fields of mineral groupings. If seven to 10 of the fields from one pipe overlap, Fipke says, "there's no doubt; it's full of diamonds. No one else out there can distinguish between these similar tiny particles of minerals that grow with a diamond and ones that don't."

"Look," he says, opening a folder on a table. He has thousands of photos of mineral grains magnified to the size of golf balls. Some are all sharp corners and jagged edges, some rounded. Since erosion and age wear the minerals down, "we can tell when we're getting closer to the source. If the edges are sharp, hey, we know they haven't traveled far from the pipe."

That level of geographic precision has allowed Fipke to stake more claims. He's even working in areas of Brazil where De Beers hasn't been able to turn a profit. "And Angola. Angola has the richest alluvial diamond river in the world," he says, "and there are thousands of diamond works there. But we're looking for the source pipes." Five years ago Fipke started making magnetometer survey flights over the Kwango River. Having identified 100 possible targets, he now has 40 men taking core samples 900 to 1,200 feet under the riverbed. "I'm there at the camp at least three times a year, hey, and it's much harder than in the Arctic. Your drilling equipment just gets buried in enormous piles at customs in Luanda and you can't get it. In the Northwest Territories it was cold, hey, and full of snow, but you get a good parka and you're a bug in a rug. Angola is the most inefficient place on earth!"

I start to ask another question, but Fipke has something else in mind. "I'm hungry, hey," he barks, as the door to the map room slams shut behind us. "Do you like oysters?" But we're not going anywhere: He has locked his keys in the room and has to call someone to drive in and open up his office.

We finally head into town. "Hi, Chuck!" says the hostess, leading us to the back room of a hip Asian fusion place. Around a long table sit 23 young women, all sporting stilettos and big hair. "Chuck!" they shout. We have, it seems, shown up at the bachelorette party for Fipke's granddaughter. The hostess seats us at the next table. Fipke orders four dozen oysters and a bottle of wine that has to be driven to the restaurant from some special cellar, and a young women shimmies into the booth next to Fipke. "Chuck," she says, kissing him on the cheek, "do you think you can pay for us all tonight?"

"Sure," Fipke says, beaming.

"Do you remember this?" says another woman — his daughter, it turns out, who slides in next to him, holding up a purse. "You bought it for me!"

With Fipke suddenly bankrolling the night, the girls break loose, and the restaurant staff starts hauling out the bottles of champagne. Pretty soon a couple of lasses are dancing on the tables, the oysters are slipping down, a second bottle of rare wine is being decanted, and Fipke is remixing the menu like Danny DeVito in Get Shorty.

And the tales spill forth: three week forays into the Peruvian Amazon, travels with the Kalahari Bushmen of Southern Africa, visits to the pygmies of the Ituri forest in the Congo. "I'd just leave my family and go, hey," he says. "I was really into native culture."

Somebody asks him about Brazil, and it reminds him of something important. "Caipirinhas!" he shouts out of the blue. "I want 25 caipirinhas!"

When the bill arrives, it's 3 feet long and $4,000. Fipke pays up, and we spill into the night — his daughter and granddaughter and their friends and now boyfriends, who joined us in the restaurant. On the street, Fipke suddenly leaps into the air and delivers a solid, suede loafer-clad foot to the head of a parking meter. "I fucking hate parking meters, hey!" he shouts. He jumps and kicks another one, and then erupts into a fit of giggles.

We are ushered past the velvet rope at the Cheetah Lounge, Kelowna's classiest strip joint, and Captain Chaos orders another round of caipirinhas for everyone. Three generations of Fipkes pound drinks as naked women dangle upside down from poles onstage.

The room is spinning by the time Fipke takes me aside and lays a big warm hand on my arm. "Hey," he says, "here's the thing. I learned that I did my best. I mean, I really tried my best. How many people can say that? I worked hard, and I mean really hard. I worked seven days a week from 8 am until 3 am. Every day. We drilled and drilled all winter when it was dark and the windchill was 80 below. Everyone thought I was crazy. But most people just never do their best, hey. And I did."

Contributing editor Carl Hoffman (carlhoffmn@earthlink.net) wrote about the private space company SpaceX in issue 15.06.

Whether your fantasy hotel is a Star Wars-style cave dwelling or a Hobbit hole in New Zealand, specialty accommodations around the world will fulfill your nerdy needs.

Other hotels geek out with crazy gear, from Apple- and Microsoft-themed suites to virtual golf courses. And while WiFi has become a common hotel offering, a high-tech hotel in the Middle East extends internet access all the way to its private beach.

These and other specialty accommodations make Wired.com's list of top geek hotels.

Hôtel Sidi Driss, Matmata, Tunisia

Left: The Tunisian town of Matmata is riddled with troglodyte dwellings, vertical caves dug out by humans and turned into homes. The Hôtel Sidi Driss is one such desert delight.

Geek factor: Does the cave hotel look strangely familiar? The interior was used as a Star Wars filming location — it's the Lars' homestead on Tatooine.

Hotel Sax, Chicago

Plenty of businesses have gotten into bed with Microsoft. Now you can, too: Chicago's Hotel Sax has a partnership with the software giant that lets weary travelers relax into "the Microsoft Experience."

Geek factor: The Studio, Hotel Sax's "Entertainment Lounge" available to all guests features Microsoft gear like Xbox 360s and Zunes. Don't want to share? Book your own private "Entertainment Technology" studio or suite.

Hotel 1000, Seattle

The operators of this high-tech hotel sank millions of dollars into the latest gear. With luxuries like ubiquitous WiFi, HD TVs and a "fully converged IP infrastructure" that allows for internet-enabled personalization of everything from room temperatures to the art on the walls, Hotel 1000 was a shoe-in for Hospitality Technology magazine's 2008 award for overall technology innovation.

Geek factor: After playing around on the hotel's virtual golf course, just flip the electronic "do not disturb" sign to keep hotel staff or annoying co-workers at bay.

Hotel Avante, Mountain View, California

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Hotel Avante is making a big play for big players. The 91-room boutique hotel bills itself — and its guests — as "smart, visionary, iconoclastic and artistic."

Geek factor: To further its "creative clubhouse" atmosphere, each room includes an "executive toy box" with a yo-yo, an Etch A Sketch, a Rubik's Cube, playing cards and a Slinky.

Capsule Inn Akihabara, Tokyo

Capsule Inn Akihabara is one of only a few places to stay in "Electric Town," Tokyo's anime/otaku hub and the site of the largest electronics market in the world. The tiny capsule rooms look like washing machines from the outside.

Geek factor: The hotel's sleeping units are "designed in the image of a jet airplane's cockpit" with every device in the capsule — TV, radio, alarm clock, lighting — designed to be controlled from a sleeping position.

The Pod Hotel, New York

With free WiFi, iPod docks, relatively inexpensive rooms (called "pods") and the opportunity to make new friends in its shared bathrooms, The Pod Hotel in Manhattan's Midtown East neighborhood is making a play for the Facebook generation. Antisocial guests will be pleased to know that some rooms have private baths.

Geek factor: Nicknamed the "Facebook Hotel," this place has its own social networking site to help guests find someone for dinner, drinks, shopping or whatever.

Tribeca Grand Hotel, New York

With its plush bar and 98-seat screening room, the Tribeca Grand is definitely swanky. But book an iStudio and you'll be pampered, Apple-style.

Geek factor: The iStudio rooms. They're decked out with Apple products, including a Power Mac G5, photo- and video-editing software and an iPod.

Woodlyn Park, New Zealand

Woodlyn Park is home to Billy Black's Kiwi Culture Show, with sheep shearing and a dancing pig. But the real star of the complex is The Hobbit Motel, two polystyrene-block units with circular doors built into a hillside.

Geek factor: You can pretend you're a hobbit.

Icehotel, Jukkasjärvi, Sweden

The Icehotel says it offers "an experience of a lifetime as well as an encounter with art and design that will surprise your senses." Since it's made of ice and snow, that claim sounds perfectly believable. You can book hot or cold accommodations at the Icehotel. Each ice room is designed by an artist, such as the one shown here by Andrea Thomson. Got the shivers? Heat up from the inside out at the Absolut Icebar.

Geek factor: The ice palace in the Bond flick Die Another Day was inspired by this hotel.

Emirates Palace Hotel, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Everything's superdeluxe at this Middle Eastern resort hotel, and it's even better if you step up a notch: All suites boast 61-inch plasma TVs (regular rooms have puny 50-inchers). All guest rooms have handheld computers that control switches and outlets — set your language preference for the interactive screens upon check-in.

Geek factor: Free WiFi reaches all poolside areas and even the private beach.

Hotel Tomo, San Francisco

From anime-inspired wall paintings to glow-in-the-dark desk blotters, Hotel Tomo kicks out the J-pop jams. See Wired.com's photo gallery on this Japanophile find, "San Francisco's Hotel Tomo Jacks Into Japanese Culture."

Geek factor: Deluxe gaming suites come with PlayStation 3, Wii, beanbag chairs and a 6-foot LCD projection screen.

Plink. Plink. Tink. One billion dollars of up-front investment and it all comes down to this: a slow but steady trickle of milky white pebbles dropping from a funnel into an acrylic jar. The jar is locked inside a glass case that's inside a vault that's inside the high-security Red Area of a prefab aluminum building on the Canadian tundra. Every 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year, miners for the South African company De Beers blast 3,150 tons of rock — enough to fill 80 trucks — from under the earth near this aluminum building and feed it into crushers, scrubbers, sifters, and x-ray machines. It's a lot of effort for a little, but the little is a lot: the equivalent of two coffee mugs a day full of rough diamonds.

Running a diamond mine in the Arctic is a mind-boggling undertaking. "This is a camp in the middle of nowhere," says Peter Mooney, manager of the processing plant at Snap Lake, "and a bloody horrible winter's day in Africa is the nicest summer day here. The real problem with diamonds isn't even their scarcity," he says. "It's that getting them takes a lot of science and engineering and lots and lots of money."

Fipke doesn't work for De Beers — they're competitors — but the Snap Lake project, just like the ones at Ekati and Diavik, is part of the new era that Fipke created. The only way in is by air on company charter flights, except for six to 10 weeks in winter when ice road truckers — just like on the History Channel show — cart in fuel, mining machines and haul trucks, dormitories and parts for generators, conveyor belts, explosives.

On a 4,000-foot gravel runway, commuter planes and 737s trade approaches and takeoffs with C-130 Hercules flights full of cargo. After my ATR threads its way to the ground, a yellow school bus picks me up and drops me at a snaking series of linked prefab trailers containing sleeping quarters, offices, and a cafeteria. I fill out forms. I agree to be searched at any time. I agree not pick up any rocks from the ground, even the smallest pebble. Hundreds of closed-circuit cameras watch my every move.

Snap Lake is unusual — instead of blowing straight up to the surface, the magma followed a crooked path through fissures in the surrounding granite. Snap Lake's kimberlite is a 9-foot-thick, 2.5-by-1.6-mile seam angling slightly downward. It's also about 200 feet under a lake that's frozen most of the year. So all of Snap Lake's mining is underground — a cold, wet, black world of rising and falling tunnels constantly leaking water from the lake above.

The operation consumes 25,000 gallons of fuel a day — and the work never stops. Miners drill holes in rock faces, insert explosives, and blow out over 1,500 tons of gray kimberlite per blast, twice a day. Trucks carry the ore to a large bin where it's stored. Then it's sent to a crusher that feeds the rock onto a mile-long conveyor belt that carries it to the surface, to the Blue Area, specifically a 5-story building of more crushers and sifters and shakers and screens and heavy liquid cyclone separators that pick out all the heavy ore. It's a roaring maze of steel grates and 60-foot staircases.

Eventually the conveyors pass into a more secure building-within-the-building, the Red Area. It's accessible only via a room the size of a closet; when the door behind me locks, cameras confirm that I'm alone. A green light tells me to proceed through zigzagging rooms that would be difficult to, say, kick a diamond through.

The ore passes down through another tower of sorters — x-rays illuminate diamonds. A secondary (and secret) process uses lasers to further refine the stream. At the end of the line, past an 8-inch-thick steel door and a set of steel bars, is the vault itself, a small room with half a dozen cameras and a big, rectangular glass box shot with glove-lined holes, like an incubator for premature infants. Stones — some the size of pin heads, others the size of gum balls — drop into a jar. Sometimes five minutes pass with nary a gem, and then two or three tumble out at once. Over the course of a year, there will be 1.2 million carats. Some are opaque; some are as clear as glass. Of the 430 men and women working here, no more than 60 will ever see this vault — or any diamonds. Ever. I slip my hands through the holes and into gloves, and pick up the biggest rock I see, a perfect 5-carat octahedral crystal three times older than the human species, formed during the age of the mastodons. A chunk of pure carbon, beautiful and banal. I ask how much it's worth. "Not allowed to say," Mooney says. "Put it this way: That's a hell of a lot of diamonds."

Diamond jewelry has never moved me. But suddenly, holding this stone, I can't help it. I want one. The gears in my mind whir. And it's as if Mooney can hear them. "People get very clever," he says, "and very determined. We haven't had any theft here yet, but we check the gloves for holes every day." I gently place the stone back in the pile.

Exiting requires an additional turn into a room with an x-ray machine and a glass wall. Under the gaze of a man who says, "Don't worry, I've seen it all," I strip to my underpants, place my clothes and shoes and socks through the x-ray machine. Open my mouth. Show behind my ears. Sit in a chair and show the bottoms of my feet. Stand and run my fingers under the band of my underpants. There's only one hiding place left, which happily they don't check. I'm cleared and allowed to dress.

Dec. 2: It's a double milestone for nuclear energy. The first man-made sustained nuclear chain reaction was created this day in 1942. And just 15 years later, the first full-scale nuclear power plant went online.

1942: Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and their colleagues achieve a successful, controlled chain reaction in a squash court underneath the football grandstand of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. It lays the groundwork for the first atomic bombs.

Fermi and Szilard had been working on nuclear fission at Columbia University in New York, when Einstein wrote of their work to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein feared that German nuclear researchers might gain an unbeatable lead in the field and develop an atomic weapon that could win the war.

The Roosevelt administration responded with the then-secret, now-famous Manhattan Project. Top U.S. atomic scientists soon gathered in Chicago to see just how feasible it was to start a nuclear chain reaction, starting with a controlled rather than explosive one.

The original idea was to build a nuclear pile at a location in the Argonne Forest about 30 miles outside Chicago, but there were construction problems. Remarkably, the experiment was relocated to the University of Chicago campus inside city limits.

Construction began Nov. 16, 1942. The team got uranium from an Iowa State University researcher and Westinghouse Electric. Staffers worked around the clock to build a wooden structure on which they placed a lattice of 57 layers, comprising six tons of uranium metal and 40 tons of uranium oxide embedded in 380 tons of graphite blocks.

The whole apparatus was encased in a custom square balloon built by Goodyear Tire. The Chicago Pile-1 cost $2.7 million (about $36 million in today's money).

The Dec. 2 experiment began at 9:45 a.m. with more than 50 people in attendance. A three-man "suicide squad" was ready to douse the reactor in case it threatened to get out of control. Besides the main On/Off switch, there was a weighted safety rod that would automatically trip if neutron intensity got too high, a hand-operated backup safety rod, and "SCRAM" — the safety control rod ax-man, a top staffer wielding an ax to cut a rope to drop the safety rod, if all else failed.

The suicide squad wasn't needed. The pile achieved a sustained nuclear reaction at 3:25, and Fermi shut it down at 3:53. Those 28 minutes changed the world.

So secret was the project that at a party a few days later, the scientists' spouses didn't know what the all the congratulations were about. They wouldn't find out what had happened and where the technology was headed for another two-and-a-half years. And then, the world knew.

1957: The light-water breeder reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania — the first in the United States — goes to full power on the anniversary of Chicago Pile-1.

An experimental breeder reactor devised by Chicago Pile-1 veteran Walter Zinn had created the first nuclear-generated electricity in 1951. President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ground for the first commercial plant, to be operated by Pittsburgh's Duquesne Light Company, in 1954.

Westinghouse Electric designed the plant in conjunction with the Atomic Energy Commission. When it was in operation, nuclear fission heated water, which transferred its heat to convert the water in a secondary system into steam, which drove the turbine that created the electricity.

Shippingport shipped its first power into the Pittsburgh grid Dec. 18, 1957. Eisenhower returned to formally dedicate the plant the following May 26.

The plant was decomissioned in 1982 after a quarter-century of use. In the first complete U.S. decontamination, the reactor vessel was shipped to a low-level waste disposal facility at the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington.

After the Shippingport site was cleaned, the government released it for unrestricted use in 1987, suitable for picnicking or a children's playground. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers designated the plant as a landmark, and it's now open to visitors.

Sources: Argonne National Laboratory, American Society of Mechanical Engineers

Since the arcade heyday of Space Invaders and Pac-Man, coin-op machines have coaxed kids into forking over their pocket change. But once it's GAME OVER, what are you left with? Empty pockets and your initials on the high-score table? That won't buy those Warhammer figurines.

Well, now one of the hottest toy trends out of thrifty Japan is piggy banks that turn stockpiling yen into a game. In 2006, the Tomy company launched its Jinsei Ginko ("Life Bank"), a coin repository with an electronic version of the board game Life. It was such a hit that today there's a range of increasingly sophisticated banks, tailored for both genders and encompassing several genres.

Here's a look at a few piggys that are gobbling up the nation's yen, and the gameplay you get when you drop some dough.

This high-tech piggy bank started it all. The LCD screen is inhabited by a stick-figure avatar who can have various jobs like businessman or musician or president. He is your pet, sort of like a Tamagotchi that you have to feed with yen.

Let's play it safe, join the work force as a corporate warrior. Our young salaryman starts out in a one-room dilapidated apartment, eating bowls of cheap noodles. Five days in, he has only saved a mere 500 yen. Pathetic.

Work, work, work. Endless! Our businessman races back into his office, briefcase in tow, only to end up hunched over a desk late into the night.

Here comes the bride, the stick figure bride! (Isn't she a knock out?) We've dumped thousands of yen into the Jinsei Ginko, and our avatar is moving up in the virtual world. With enough money in the bank and ample stick-figure charm, the salaryman is able to convince a fetching young lady to accept his hand in marriage.

As you move closer to maxing out the bank at 100,000 yen, your avatar moves out of his urban shoebox into a penthouse apartment with a beautiful view of the city. Raise your glass, salaryman-san. You've hit the 2-bit LCD big time!

The worst part of Japanese RGPs is grinding through the damn game, looking for money. Here's a thought: Look in your wallet! Instead of using in-game currency, BankQuest uses your coins.

Still wet behind the ears, our hero enters the Tower, but he's brought an ax to a sword fight — not to mention a stupid-looking hat. Let's plunk some cold hard cashola into the bank so we can level up. Whenever players put change into this role-playing lock box, the gargoyle's mouth glows red and the in-game hero gets credit.

Once you've converted real money into virtual money, your avatar can buy weapons, armor and even health — regeneration potions in the village shops outside the castle walls. "Welcome!" says the shopkeeper.

As you toggle through the goods in the shop, you'll spot cool merch like this blade that looks like it could cut a swath through hundreds of tiny LCD monsters. Must-have.

Back in the Tower, our hero's brandishing his new gleaming sword and fancy hairdo. Just like in a standard RPG, leveling up changes the characters' appearance, and right now you look pretty darn good.

Just like in any standard RPG, enemies pop up asking for a butt-whoppin'. Ack! There's a globby one. But with a badass sword in hand, that monster is so toast. The hero roams dungeons killing monsters and amassing treasure before he faces down the final boss, the dastardly spendthrift Devil Warudollar (waru means "bad").

Why drain your purse on dates with real men? Following schmaltzy romance novel plot lines, Ikemen Bank is a vault you can fall in love with. Literally. This heart-shaped vault is a renai (dating game) that lets frugal gals find romance while saving money. Ikemen is Japanese slang for "handsome guy," and there are five hunky suitors to select from: the cool dude, the TV star, the rich kid, the buff athlete and the sugar daddy. Just look at that dreamboat. He's so, well, dreamy.

Cool guy is hungry, and when cool guy is hungry, you damn well better feed him. Tonight's din-din is a traditional meal. "Delicious!" he says, emptying another bowl of rice.

What. An. Evening. Tonight was truly a date to remember forever and ever. That is, until the next one. But before parting, cool guy pulls you close, whispering sweet nothings. Each time a coin is inserted, he'll say things like "I want to smooch," or "You really look great today," or "Let me give you a shoulder rub." Swoon!

Great date aside, you're totally busy with real world stuff! And you totally forget to insert money into your Ikemen Bank for a whole working week. Your greedy hunk writes you a letter that simply says, "Sayonara." No translation needed.

In June 2005, a balding, slightly overweight, perpetually T-shirt-clad 26-year-old computer consultant named Dan Kaminsky decided to get in shape. He began by scanning the Internet for workout tips and read that five minutes of sprinting was the equivalent of a half-hour jog. This seemed like a great shortcut—an elegant exercise hack—so he bought some running shoes at the nearest Niketown. That same afternoon, he laced up his new kicks and burst out the front door of his Seattle apartment building for his first five-minute workout. He took a few strides, slipped on a concrete ramp and crashed to the sidewalk, shattering his left elbow.

He spent the next few weeks stuck at home in a Percocet-tinged haze. Before the injury, he'd spent his days testing the inner workings of software programs. Tech companies hired him to root out security holes before hackers could find them. Kaminsky did it well. He had a knack for breaking things—bones and software alike.

But now, laid up in bed, he couldn't think clearly. His mind drifted. Running hadn't worked out so well. Should he buy a stationary bike? Maybe one of those recumbent jobs would be best. He thought about partying in Las Vegas ... mmm, martinis ... and recalled a trick he'd figured out for getting free Wi-Fi at Starbucks.

As his arm healed, the details of that Starbucks hack kept nagging at him. He remembered that he had gotten into Starbucks' locked network using the domain name system, or DNS. When someone types google .com into a browser, DNS has a list of exactly where Google's servers are and directs the traffic to them. It's like directory assistance for the Internet. At Starbucks, the port for the low-bandwidth DNS connection—port 53—was left open to route customers to the Pay for Starbucks Wi-Fi Web page.

So, rather than pay, Kaminsky used port 53 to access the open DNS connection and get online. It was free but super-slow, and his friends mocked him mercilessly. To Kaminsky that was an irresistible challenge. After weeks of studying the minutiae of DNS and refining his hack, he was finally able to stream a 12-second animated video of Darth Vader dancing a jig with Michael Flatley. (The clip paired the Lord of the Sith with the Lord of the Dance.)

That was more than a year ago, but it still made him smile. DNS was the unglamorous underbelly of the Internet, but it had amazing powers. Kaminsky felt drawn to the obscure, often-ignored protocol all over again.

Maybe the painkillers loosened something in his mind, because as Kaminsky began to think more deeply about DNS he became convinced that something wasn't right. He couldn't quite figure it out, but the feeling stuck with him even after he stopped taking the pain pills. He returned to work full time and bought a recumbent stationary bike. He got hired to test the security of Windows Vista before it was released, repeatedly punching holes in it for Microsoft. Still, in the back of his mind, he was sure that the entire DNS system was vulnerable to attack.

Then last January, on a drizzly Sunday afternoon, he flopped down on his bed, flipped open his laptop, and started playing games with DNS. He used a software program called Scapy to fire random queries at the system. He liked to see how it would respond and decided to ask for the location of a series of nonexistent Web pages at a Fortune 500 company. Then he tried to trick his DNS server in San Diego into thinking that he knew the location of the bogus pages.

Suddenly it worked. The server accepted one of the fake pages as real. But so what? He could now supply fake information for a page nobody would ever visit. Then he realized that the server was willing to accept more information from him. Since he had supplied data about one of the company's Web pages, it believed that he was an authoritative source for general information about the company's domain. The server didn't know that the Web page didn't exist—it was listening to Kaminsky now, as if it had been hypnotized.

When DNS was created in 1983, it was designed to be helpful and trusting—it's directory assistance, after all. It was a time before hacker conventions and Internet banking. Plus, there were only a few hundred servers to keep track of. Today, the humble protocol stores the location of a billion Web addresses and routes every piece of Internet traffic in the world.

Security specialists have been revamping and strengthening DNS for more than two decades. But buried beneath all this tinkering, Kaminsky had just discovered a vestige of that original helpful and trusting program. He was now face-to-face with the behemoth's almost childlike core, and it was perfectly content to accept any information he wanted to supply about the location of the Fortune 500 company's servers.

Kaminsky froze. This was far more serious than anything he could have imagined. It was the ultimate hack. He was looking at an error coded into the heart of the Internet's infrastructure. This was not a security hole in Windows or a software bug in a Cisco router. This would allow him to reassign any Web address, reroute anyone's email, take over banking sites, or simply scramble the entire global system. The question was: Should he try it?

The vulnerability gave him the power to transfer millions out of bank accounts worldwide. He lived in a barren one-bedroom apartment and owned almost nothing. He rented the bed he was lying on as well as the couch and table in the living room. The walls were bare. His refrigerator generally contained little more than a few forgotten slices of processed cheese and a couple of Rockstar energy drinks. Maybe it was time to upgrade his lifestyle.

Or, for the sheer geeky joy of it, he could reroute all of .com into his laptop, the digital equivalent of channeling the Mississippi into a bathtub. It was a moment hackers around the world dream of—a tool that could give them unimaginable power. But maybe it was best simply to close his laptop and forget it. He could pretend he hadn't just stumbled over a skeleton key to the Net. Life would certainly be less complicated. If he stole money, he'd risk prison. If he told the world, he'd be the messenger of doom, potentially triggering a collapse of Web-based commerce.

But who was he kidding? He was just some guy. The problem had been coded into Internet architecture in 1983. It was 2008. Somebody must have fixed it by now. He typed a quick series of commands and pressed enter. When he tried to access the Fortune 500 company's Web site, he was redirected to an address he himself had specified.

"Oh shit," he mumbled. "I just broke the Internet."

Paul Vixie, one of the creators of the most widely used DNS software, stepped out of a conference in San Jose. A curious email had just popped up on his laptop. A guy named Kaminsky said he'd found a serious flaw in DNS and wanted to talk. He sent along his phone number.

Vixie had been working with DNS since the 1980s and had helped solve some serious problems over the years. He was president of the Internet Systems Consortium, a nonprofit that distributed BIND 9, his DNS software. At 44, he was considered the godfather of DNS. If there was a fundamental error in DNS, he probably would have fixed it long ago.

But to be on the safe side, Vixie decided to call Kaminsky. He picked up immediately and within minutes had outlined the flaw. A series of emotions swept over Vixie. What he was hearing shouldn't be possible, and yet everything the kid said was logical. By the end of the third minute, Vixie realized that Kaminsky had uncovered something that the best minds in computer science had overlooked. This affected not just BIND 9 but almost all DNS software. Vixie felt a deep flush of embarrassment, followed by a sense of pure panic.

"The first thing I want to say to you," Vixie told Kaminsky, trying to contain the flood of feeling, "is never, ever repeat what you just told me over a cell phone."

Vixie knew how easy it was to eavesdrop on a cell signal, and he had heard enough to know that he was facing a problem of global significance. If the information were intercepted by the wrong people, the wired world could be held ransom. Hackers could wreak havoc. Billions of dollars were at stake, and Vixie wasn't going to take any risks.

From that moment on, they would talk only on landlines, in person, or via heavily encrypted email. If the information in an email were accidentally copied onto a hard drive, that hard drive would have to be completely erased, Vixie said. Secrecy was critical. They had to find a solution before the problem became public.

Andreas Gustafsson knew something was seriously wrong. Vixie had emailed the 43-year-old DNS researcher in Espoo, Finland, asking to talk at 7 pm on a hardwired line. No cell phones.

Gustafsson hurried into the freezing March evening—his only landline was the fax in his office a brisk mile walk away. When he arrived, he saw that the machine didn't have a handset. Luckily, he had an analog phone lying around. He plugged it in, and soon it let off an old-fashioned metallic ring.

Gustafsson hadn't spoken to Vixie in years, but Vixie began the conversation by reading aloud a series of numbers—a code that would later allow him to authenticate Gustafsson's emails and prove that he was communicating with the right person. Gustafsson responded with his own authenticating code. With that out of the way, Vixie got to his point: Find a flight to Seattle now.

Wouter Wijngaards got a call as well, and the message was the same. The Dutch open source programmer took the train to the airport in Amsterdam, got on a 10-hour flight to Seattle, and arrived at the Silver Cloud Inn in Redmond, Washington, on March 29. He had traveled all the way from Europe, and he didn't even know why. Like Gustafsson, he had simply been told to show up in Building Nine on the Microsoft campus at 10 am on March 31.

In the lobby of the Silver Cloud, Wijngaards met Florian Weimer, a German DNS researcher he knew. Weimer was talking with Chad Dougherty, the DNS point man from Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute. Wijngaards joined the conversation—they were trying to figure out where to have dinner. Nobody talked about why some of the world's leading DNS experts happened to bump into one another near the front desk of this generic US hotel. Vixie had sworn each of them to secrecy. They simply went out for Vietnamese food and avoided saying anything about DNS.

The next morning, Kaminsky strode to the front of the conference room at Microsoft headquarters before Vixie could introduce him or even welcome the assembled heavy hitters. The 16 people in the room represented Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and the most important designers of modern DNS software.

Vixie was prepared to say a few words, but Kaminsky assumed that everyone was there to hear what he had to say. After all, he'd earned the spotlight. He hadn't sold the discovery to the Russian mob. He hadn't used it to take over banks. He hadn't destroyed the Internet. He was actually losing money on the whole thing: As a freelance computer consultant, he had taken time off work to save the world. In return, he deserved to bask in the glory of discovery. Maybe his name would be heralded around the world.

Kaminsky started by laying out the timeline. He had discovered a devastating flaw in DNS and would explain the details in a moment. But first he wanted the group to know that they didn't have much time. On August 6, he was going to a hacker convention in Las Vegas, where he would stand before the world and unveil his amazing discovery. If there was a solution, they'd better figure it out by then.

But did Kaminsky have the goods? DNS attacks were nothing new and were considered difficult to execute. The most practical attack—widely known as cache poisoning—required a hacker to submit data to a DNS server at the exact moment that it updated its records. If he succeeded, he could change the records. But, like sperm swimming toward an egg, whichever packet got there first—legitimate or malicious—locked everything else out. If the attacker lost the race, he would have to wait until the server updated again, a moment that might not come for days. And even if he timed it just right, the server required a 16-bit ID number. The hacker had a 1-in-65,536 chance of guessing it correctly. It could take years to successfully compromise just one domain.

The experts watched as Kaminsky opened his laptop and connected the overhead projector. He had created a "weaponized" version of his attack on this vulnerability to demonstrate its power. A mass of data flashed onscreen and told the story. In less than 10 seconds, Kaminsky had compromised a server running BIND 9, Vixie's DNS routing software, which controls 80 percent of Internet traffic. It was undeniable proof that Kaminsky had the power to take down large swaths of the Internet.

The tension in the room rose as Kaminsky kept talking. The flaw jeopardized more than just the integrity of Web sites. It would allow an attacker to channel email as well. A hacker could redirect almost anyone's correspondence, from a single user's to everything coming and going between multinational corporations. He could quietly copy it before sending it along to its original destination. The victims would never know they had been compromised.

This had serious implications. Since many "forgot my password" buttons on banking sites rely on email to verify identity, an attacker could press the button, intercept the email, and change the password to anything he wanted. He would then have total access to that bank account.

"We're hosed," Wijngaards thought.

It got worse. Most Internet commerce transactions are encrypted. The encryption is provided by companies like VeriSign. Online vendors visit the VeriSign site and buy the encryption; customers can then be confident that their transactions are secure.

But not anymore. Kaminsky's exploit would allow an attacker to redirect VeriSign's Web traffic to an exact functioning replica of the VeriSign site. The hacker could then offer his own encryption, which, of course, he could unlock later. Unsuspecting vendors would install the encryption and think themselves safe and ready for business. A cornerstone of secure Internet communication was in danger of being destroyed.

David Ulevitch smiled despite himself. The founder of OpenDNS, a company that operates DNS servers worldwide, was witnessing a tour de force—the geek equivalent of Michael Phelps winning his eighth gold medal. As far as Ulevitch was concerned, there had never been a vulnerability of this magnitude that was so easy to use. "This is an amazingly catastrophic attack," he marveled with a mix of grave concern and giddy awe.

It was a difficult flight back to San Francisco for Sandy Wilbourn, vice president of engineering for Nominum, a company hired by broadband providers to supply 150 million customers with DNS service. What he heard in Redmond was overwhelming—a 9 out of 10 on the scale of disasters. He might have given it a 10, but it was likely to keep getting worse. He was going to give this one some room to grow.

One of Wilbourn's immediate concerns was that about 40 percent of the country's broadband Internet ran through his servers. If word of the vulnerability leaked, hackers could quickly compromise those servers.

In his Redwood City, California, office, he isolated a hard drive so no one else in the company could access it. Then he called in his three top engineers, shut the door, and told them that what he was about to say couldn't be shared with anyone—not at home, not at the company. Even their interoffice email would have to be encrypted from now on.

Their task: Make a change to the basic functioning of Nominum's DNS servers. They and their customers would have to do it without the usual testing or feedback from outside the group. The implementation—the day the alteration went live to millions of people—would be its first real-world test.

It was a daunting task, but everyone who had been in Redmond had agreed to do the same thing. They would do it secretly, and then, all together on July 8, they would release their patches. If hackers didn't know there was a gaping DNS security hole before, they would know then. They just wouldn't know exactly what it was. Nominum and the other DNS software vendors would have to persuade their customers—Internet service providers from regional players such as Cablevision to giants like Comcast—to upgrade fast. It would be a race to get servers patched before hackers figured it out.

Though the Redmond group had agreed to act in concert, the patch—called the source port randomization solution—didn't satisfy everyone. It was only a short-term fix, turning what had been a 1-in-65,536 chance of success into a 1-in-4 billion shot.

Still, a hacker could use an automated system to flood a server with an endless stream of guesses. With a high-speed connection, a week of nonstop attacking would likely succeed. Observant network operators would see the spike in traffic and could easily block it. But, if overlooked, the attack could still work. The patch only papered over the fundamental flaw that Kaminsky had exposed.

On July 8, Nominum, Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Ubuntu, and Red Hat, among many others, released source port randomization patches. Wilbourn called it the largest multivendor patch in the history of the Internet. The ISPs and broadband carriers like Verizon and Comcast that had been asked to install it wanted to know what the problem was. Wilbourn told them it was extremely important that they deploy the patch, but the reason would remain a secret until Kaminsky delivered his talk in Las Vegas.

Even as Kaminsky was giving interviews about the urgency of patching to media outlets from the Los Angeles Times to CNET, the computer security industry rebelled. "Those of us ... who have to advise management cannot tell our executives 'trust Dan,'" wrote one network administrator on a security mailing list. On one blog, an anonymous poster wrote this to Kaminsky: "You ask people not to speculate so your talk isn't blown but then you whore out minor details to every newspaper/magazine/publishing house so your name can go all over Google and gain five minutes of fame? This is why people hate you and wish you would work at McDonald's instead."

With a backlash building, Kaminsky decided to reach out to a few influential security experts in hopes of winning them over. He set up a conference call with Rich Mogull, founder of Securosis, a well-respected security firm; researcher Dino Dai Zovi; and Thomas Ptacek, a detractor who would later accuse Vixie and Kaminsky of forming a cabal.

The call occurred July 9. Kaminsky agreed to reveal the vulnerability if Mogull, Dai Zovi, and Ptacek would keep it secret until the Vegas talk August 6. They agreed, and Kaminsky's presentation laid it out for them. The security experts were stunned. Mogull wrote, "This is absolutely one of the most exceptional research projects I've seen." And in a blog post Ptacek wrote, "Dan's got the goods. It's really f'ing good."

And then, on July 21, a complete description of the exploit appeared on the Web site of Ptacek's company. He claimed it was an accident but acknowledged that he had prepared a description of the hack so he could release it concurrently with Kaminsky. By the time he removed it, the description had traversed the Web. The DNS community had kept the secret for months. The computer security community couldn't keep it 12 days.

About a week later, an AT&T server in Texas was infiltrated using the Kaminsky method. The attacker took over google.com—when AT&T Internet subscribers in the Austin area tried to navigate to Google, they were redirected to a Google look-alike that covertly clicked ads. Whoever was behind the attack probably profited from the resulting increase in ad revenue.

Every day counted now. While Kaminsky, Vixie, and the others pleaded with network operators to install the patch, it's likely that other hacks occurred. But the beauty of the Kaminsky attack, as it was now known, was that it left little trace. A good hacker could reroute email, reset passwords, and transfer money out of accounts quickly. Banks were unlikely to announce the intrusions—online theft is bad PR. Better to just cover the victims' losses.

On August 6, hundreds of people crammed into a conference room at Caesars Palace to hear Kaminsky speak. The seats filled up quickly, leaving a scrum of spectators standing shoulder to shoulder in the back. A group of security experts had mockingly nominated Kaminsky for the Most Overhyped Bug award, and many wanted to know the truth: Was the massive patching effort justified, or was Kaminsky just an arrogant, media-hungry braggart?

While his grandmother handed out homemade Swedish lace cookies, Kaminsky took the stage wearing a black T-shirt featuring an image of Pac-Man at a dinner table. He tried for modesty. "Who am I?" he asked rhetorically. "Some guy. I do code."

The self-deprecation didn't suit him. He had the swagger of a rock star and adopted the tone of a misunderstood genius. After detailing the scope of the DNS problem, he stood defiantly in front of a bullet point summary of the attack and said, "People called BS on me. This is my reply."

By this time, hundreds of millions of Internet users were protected. The bomb had been defused. The problem was, there was little agreement on what the long-term solution should be. Most discussion centered around the concept of authenticating every bit of DNS traffic. It would mean that every computer in the world—from iPhones to corporate server arrays—would have to carry DNS authentication software. The root server could guarantee that it was communicating with the real .com name server, and .com would receive cryptological assurance that it was dealing with, say, the real Google. An impostor packet wouldn't be able to authenticate itself, putting an end to DNS attacks. The procedure is called DNSSEC and has high-profile proponents, including Vixie and the US government.

But implementing a massive and complicated protocol like DNSSEC isn't easy. Vixie has actually been trying to persuade people for years, and even he hasn't succeeded. Either way, the point might turn out to be moot. Kaminsky ended his Las Vegas talk by hinting that even darker security problems lay ahead. It was the type of grandstanding that has made him a polarizing figure in the computer security community. "There is no saving the Internet," he said. "There is postponing the inevitable for a little longer."

Then he sauntered off the stage and ate one of his grandma's cookies.

Contributing editor Joshua Davis(www.joshuadavis.net) wrote about the rescue of the foundering Cougar Ace in issue 16.03.

LOS ANGELES — Scientific accidents have brought some of the most groundbreaking discoveries — vulcanized rubber, X-rays, penicillin — and now scientists at UCLA have accidentally discovered a material that could make digital cameras as we know them obsolete.

Graduate student Hsiang-Yu Chen was working on a new formula for solar cells when something went wrong. Instead of creating electricity when hit with light, the conductivity of the material she was working with changed.

"The original purpose [was] to make a solar cell more efficient," says Chen. "However, during the research we found the solar cell phenomenon [had] disappeared." Instead, the test material showed high gain photoconductivity, indicating potential use as a photo sensor.

Thanks to this lucky mistake, a new breed of camera sensors that are cheaper, higher-resolution and have lower distortion could be on the horizon. Click through the gallery to learn how this new breakthrough works and tour the labs where the magic happens.

Left: A piece of glass houses five strips of this new material, held between tweezers in a glove box.

Here, materials science Ph.D. student Hsiang-Yu Chen takes a polymer sample from a tray inside a glove box. Researchers in this lab test hundreds of samples before a material with desirable properties is found.

When Chen made the discovery, she was working on plastic-like substances with quantum dots — nanoparticles (roughly the size of a virus) with properties similar to a semiconductor.

The nano-size quantum dots could give photo sensors much higher resolution than current models. And because this new photo-sensing material is a polymer film, it's flexible and could someday be inexpensive to produce.

At left is a pair of stills that concentrate polymer solutions. Later, the solutions will be tested for their response to light.

Currently, the sensor in your camera that detects light and allows you to capture an image is made out of silicon. This makes it relatively expensive as well as flat and inflexible.

Having a flat sensor doesn’t seem like a big deal until you consider how your lens works. Lenses are curved, which shapes the image they see. When you project the spherical image onto a flat surface you get distortion around the edges. A flexible sensor would prevent this distortion.

The polymer- and metal-coated slide from the first photo of the gallery is now placed into an electrode clip (the white, rectangular portion of the setup). The electrodes on the clip will enable sensors to take readings from the material when it's exposed to light.

The sample in the electrode clip is inserted into the test chassis. The wires on the right send any electrical activity from the material to a computer for analysis.

A very bright, wide-spectrum light source is connected to the glove box. It's attached to the portal using a standoff header that keeps the light a fixed distance from the sample. The light appears blue because the light in the room has a yellow cast, it's actually much closer to the color of daylight.

Hsiang-Yu Chen checks the results of the test using a computer and laboratory graphing software. The graphs show the response levels to the light that the material exhibited.

In her initial experiment she was expecting to see electricity produced when the light hit the material, but instead the light stopped the flow of electricity. This means that her material acted as a photo detector instead of a solar cell.

The lab still remains committed to developing a better solar panel, but now that their findings have been published it may only be a matter of time before camera companies take notice of the technology.

An atomic force microscope is used to image the polymer sample to view its physical makeup. The AFM traces the surface of the polymer with a nanoscopic needle, the same way the needle on your record player tracks over vinyl.

This needle is attached to a cantilever that reflects a laser beam, which then determines the three-dimensional topography of the surface. Inset is the resulting micrograph of the surface from the AFM. This view allows researchers to make sure the quantum dots are properly aligning in polymer.

This tunneling electron microscope (TEM) is used to view the physical makeup of the polymer. The level of detail visible from the TEM micrographs is a few hundred nanometers. Inset is the micrograph created by the TEM of the photosensitive polymer.

1952: It's front-page news when George Jorgensen Jr. is reborn as Christine Jorgensen, gaining international celebrity and notoriety as the first widely known person to undergo a successful sex-change operation.

Jorgensen, who grew up in the Bronx, in her words, a "frail, tow-headed, introverted little boy who ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games," was drafted into the Army just after World War II. Military service only reinforced Jorgensen's belief that she was, in fact, a woman trapped inside a man's body.

After receiving her discharge, Jorgensen returned home and first heard about "sex-reassignment surgery," which was being performed only in Sweden. (It was illegal almost everywhere else, including the United States.)

Encouraged, Jorgensen began taking female hormones on her own, then headed for Sweden. She never made it. Stopping in Denmark to visit relatives in Copenhagen, Jorgensen was introduced to Christian Hamburger, a Danish surgeon who specialized in the kind of surgery she was seeking. He agreed to take the case and put his patient on hormone-replacement therapy as they prepared for surgery.

Several surgeries were required, the first one consisting of castration, which was only carried out after permission was obtained from the Danish minister of justice.

At the time of Jorgensen's transformation, Hamburger did not give her an artificial vagina, so she remained "anatomically incorrect" for several years before undergoing a vaginoplasty in the United States.

The hormone therapy resulted in profound changes to Jorgensen's body. Fat was redistributed, and she began to take on the contours of a woman. Subsequent surgeries completed the process until she was ready to step into the spotlight.

Jorgensen's sex change, which may have been leaked to the press by Jorgensen herself, hit the headlines Dec. 1, creating an international sensation. "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty" screamed the banner of Jorgensen's hometown New York Daily News.

In fact, Jorgensen was not the first person to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. During the rollicking Weimar period, German doctors performed the surgery on at least two patients. The difference, in Jorgensen's case, was that she underwent hormone-replacement therapy in conjunction with the surgery. The earlier surgeries were strictly cut-and-paste.

Although Jorgensen complained frequently about the jackals of the press, she did become something of a publicity hound and took most of the tasteless remarks with good grace, laughing off jokes such as, "Christine Jorgensen went abroad and came back a broad."

She turned to acting and became a nightclub singer as well, performing, predictably, "I Enjoy Being a Girl."

But Christine Jorgensen's world was not an enlightened one, particularly when it came to transgenderism. She paid the cost for this lack of sophistication. A first announced engagement fell through, and a second one failed as well, when the state of New York refused to issue the couple a marriage license. Her intended husband also lost his job when the marriage plans became known.

She later traveled the lecture circuit, talking about her experiences and advocating for the nascent transgender cause.

Jorgensen died of cancer in 1989, a few weeks short of age 63.

Source: Various

1952: It's front-page news when George Jorgensen Jr. is reborn as Christine Jorgensen, gaining international celebrity and notoriety as the first widely known person to undergo a successful sex-change operation.

Jorgensen, who grew up in the Bronx, in her words, a "frail, tow-headed, introverted little boy who ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games," was drafted into the Army just after World War II. Military service only reinforced Jorgensen's belief that she was, in fact, a woman trapped inside a man's body.

After receiving her discharge, Jorgensen returned home and first heard about "sex-reassignment surgery," which was being performed only in Sweden. (It was illegal almost everywhere else, including the United States.)

Encouraged, Jorgensen began taking female hormones on her own, then headed for Sweden. She never made it. Stopping in Denmark to visit relatives in Copenhagen, Jorgensen was introduced to Christian Hamburger, a Danish surgeon who specialized in the kind of surgery she was seeking. He agreed to take the case and put his patient on hormone-replacement therapy as they prepared for surgery.

Several surgeries were required, the first one consisting of castration, which was only carried out after permission was obtained from the Danish minister of justice.

At the time of Jorgensen's transformation, Hamburger did not give her an artificial vagina, so she remained "anatomically incorrect" for several years before undergoing a vaginoplasty in the United States.

The hormone therapy resulted in profound changes to Jorgensen's body. Fat was redistributed, and she began to take on the contours of a woman. Subsequent surgeries completed the process until she was ready to step into the spotlight.

Jorgensen's sex change, which may have been leaked to the press by Jorgensen herself, hit the headlines Dec. 1, creating an international sensation. "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty" screamed the banner of Jorgensen's hometown New York Daily News.

In fact, Jorgensen was not the first person to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. During the rollicking Weimar period, German doctors performed the surgery on at least two patients. The difference, in Jorgensen's case, was that she underwent hormone-replacement therapy in conjunction with the surgery. The earlier surgeries were strictly cut-and-paste.

Although Jorgensen complained frequently about the jackals of the press, she did become something of a publicity hound and took most of the tasteless remarks with good grace, laughing off jokes such as, "Christine Jorgensen went abroad and came back a broad."

She turned to acting and became a nightclub singer as well, performing, predictably, "I Enjoy Being a Girl."

But Christine Jorgensen's world was not an enlightened one, particularly when it came to transgenderism. She paid the cost for this lack of sophistication. A first announced engagement fell through, and a second one failed as well, when the state of New York refused to issue the couple a marriage license. Her intended husband also lost his job when the marriage plans became known.

She later traveled the lecture circuit, talking about her experiences and advocating for the nascent transgender cause.

Jorgensen died of cancer in 1989, a few weeks short of age 63.

Source: Various

Among the scents of fresh pine garlands, pumpkin pie, mulling spices and roast turducken filling your home this holiday season, you may catch a whiff of that old familiar vapor.

Yes, that special time of year has come again. We are officially accepting nominees for the annual Wired.com Vaporware awards, our yearly showcase of the products pitched, promised and hyped, but never delivered.

2008 is actually gearing up to be much more exciting than years past.

Some of last year's favorites won't be eligible this time around.

The Tesla Roadster is rolling off the assembly line, albeit slowly. Spore sprung to life. The Optimus Maximus keyboard successfully separated overpaid design fetishists from their Google stock dividends just in time for the market crash.

Even poor Axl Rose managed to perform his six millionth ProTools edit and get Chinese Democracy onto shelves after a 14-year wait.

All that action cleared the way for a whole new crop of crap. So, let's get to it and fill up the list with some fresh FAIL.

Got a nominee for Vaporware '08? Here are the rules:

Send your submissions to wiredvaporware@gmail.com. To make it easier on us, please put the name of the company and product in the subject line of your e-mail, as well as in the message body. And don't forget to include a couple of acerbic comments we can quote. Links are a big help, too.

The final list will be assembled by Wired.com's editors. Awards will be handed out in late December.

For the past six years, Wired magazine's Found page has presented our best guess at what lies over the horizon, from touchscreen windshields to organ farming. Turns out, this little exercise in futurism is one of your favorite pages (as we learned recently when it took a short sabbatical). So we've decided to turn Found over to our readers — what do you think our world will look like in 10, 20, or 100 years?

Each month, we'll propose a scenario. Then it's up you: Sketch out your vision, then go to wired.com/wired/found to upload your ideas, see other submissions, and vote for your favorites. We'll use the best suggestions as inspiration for a future Found page (giving full credit to the creators, of course). We’ll also select one (image-based submission) as our favorite, and note it in an update at the bottom of this text block. This week's assignment: Imagine the future of the truck stop.

Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best Found idea and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The image must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your idea and how you made it.

We don't host the images, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).

Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next few weeks to vote on new submissions, and look for an update announcing our favorite submission!

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your found idea.

(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)

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Here's our vision of the future of Wall Street in 2013. The logo of the New York Stock Exchange is written in English and Chinese. Ticker tapes, blaring cable news network updates, and new advertising overlays all bespeak a bummed out bear market that never bounced back.

We'll continue to create a new Artifacts from the Future in upcoming issues of Wired magazine. But we'd like to see your prognostications too. What do you think our world will look like in 10, 20 or 100 years? Each month, we'll propose a scenario. Then it's up you: Sketch out your vision, then return here to upload your ideas, see other submissions and vote for your favorites. Check out this month's Truck Stop of the Future challenge.

The concept and most of the text for this Found came from Senior Editor Jason Tanz. Contributing Wired magazine designer Walter Baumann, photo assistants Sarah Filippi and Daniel Salo, deputy photo editor Anna Goldman Alexander, senior editor Chris Baker and production director Jeff Lysgaard helped create the image.

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This Mobile Device Only Does Email — Perfectly

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$100, plus $20/month

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Stage a Water-Cooler Ambush With Pump-Action Nerf Blaster

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