Cool Stuff That's Coming

The Japanese researchers claim it could be used wherever paper is currently used, such as for advertisements or information bulletins in public places.

Almost as diverse as the electromagnetic spectrum itself, directed-energy weapons span a wide range of incarnations.

"When the robot reaches a destination — say, the Cheerios cereal shelf in the cereal aisle — the speech-synthesis engine generates an appropriate message telling the user that the Cheerios cereal boxes are on the shelf to his/her right." Kulyukin says.

"Some people today underestimate the pen, because that recognition software is at an early stage," Gates said. "But it’s on a very fast learning curve."

"They worked great," he said in a telephone interview. "I could walk around during the day with my sleeves rolled up. And I was able to lay down in the mud and take pictures without having any ants or weird bugs crawling on me."

"What we could see is certain financial transactions, like the distribution of credit card numbers, can be encoded in quantum states," he said.

More than 1,000 letters later, we figured we were duty-bound to compile the best reader suggestions. Here they are: the 100 best gadgets we missed in our original list.

In the following pages you’ll find our top picks grouped by category , as well as in ranked order from 1 to 100. Here, we begin with our Product of the Year.

The phone would supplant not only credit and debit cards, but wallets, checkbooks, Web sites, computer programs like Quicken, and online bill payment services such as PayPal or CheckFree.

‘They look just like any other standard urinal; they just don’t use water,’