Wired

Toyota promised me 60. The spec sheet on the 2005 Prius clearly states that the car gets five dozen miles per gallon of gas on city streets. But I'm test-driving a beige hatchback along Sepulveda Boulevard on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and according to the touchscreen on the dash, I'm topping out at 49.7.

At 28, Joe has become something of an expert at heroin detox -- he's tried it nine times. Between programs, he's attempted to quit on his own. Once, when the cravings got the best of him, he tried to knock himself out by hitting his head against a brick wall. So late last year, when Joe checked himself into a New York outpost of Phoenix House, the country's largest residential rehab program, he knew exactly what to expect: the plastic cups of methadone to wear down his dependence, the sedated days and sleepless nights, the chill of the toilet seat, the sickening sight of food.

In nations both rich and poor, families are having fewer children. As people move to crowded urban areas, and as women gain more educational and economic opportunities, countries are beginning to see their populations decline. This could have grave consequences for their economies.

As a department head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's R&D arm, David Tennenhouse spent the late 1990s approving or denying funding for hundreds of far-out military programs. One proposal he reviewed, from a research team at UC Berkeley, outlined a concept called smart dust -- fleck-sized wireless sensors intelligent enough to organize themselves into autonomous networks. Dropped from a passing helicopter, the sensors could spy on enemy movements or detect a hidden stash of mustard gas.

"My dream is big, OK?"

Coming from a man who used to boast of having a 300-year business plan, that's saying a lot. But Masayoshi Son isn't exaggerating. His latest master plan includes nothing less than the demolition of Japan's telecom industry, and, not incidentally, the revival of his moribund company, Softbank. To get there, he's hawking next-generation, superfast, supercheap DSL to the Japanese masses.

So much depends upon a lone water molecule. Take the alkaloid C17H19NO3, better known as morphine, a painkiller no hospital can do without. Lop off two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, as German chemist Augustus Matthiessen first did in 1869, and you're left with apomorphine, which is less effective at dulling pain than a shot of Southern Comfort. Instead, its most obvious effect is to cause rapid and severe vomiting -- useful when a toddler drinks Liquid-Plumer, perhaps, but hardly the stuff of pharmaceutical legend.

The vacant lot on Ames Street should have been teeming with cranes and cement trucks by now. Situated on the eastern edge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, the property is earmarked as the future home of the MIT Media Laboratory, which long ago outgrew its I. M. Pei digs next door. First announced in 1999, the planned $115 million, 197,000-square-foot complex was supposed to open this year. The date was later rolled back to 2004, then 2005. Now it's officially on hold. The Lab's brain trust won't even hazard a guess as to when the first girders might rise.

To mod the Bard: What fools these console makers be! When the Web site for Hong Kong-based hardware retailer Lik Sang International mysteriously went dark last fall, Microsoft's fingerprints were all over the shutdown. Lik Sang had been doing a brisk business in chips that disabled the Xbox's security controls, allowing hobbyists to run open source nuggets like Mozilla and Gimp on their consoles.

Fresh from a morning surf off the coast of Malibu, the maharishi of the wireless Internet shows up at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons sporting a rumpled T-shirt and Mayan sandals. It's an outfit more popular among aging head shop owners than youthful tech moguls, but Sky Dylan Dayton likes to live up to his Age of Aquarius name.

Ed Yourdon was on a tarmac in Pittsburgh when he got a glimpse of the coming software hell. His New York shuttle had been cleared for takeoff when the pilot pulled a U-turn and headed back to the gate. The flaps were stuck. "We're going to have to power down and reboot," the pilot announced. It was the aeronautical equivalent of Ctrl+Alt+Delete. "Makes you think," says Yourdon, author of Byte Wars. "Maybe they had Windows 95 underneath the hood."