(Say it like "Watson.")

There's no other bird like a hoatzin. "It is the only bird that has a foregut for fermentation, like a cow's," explains Penn State biologist Blair Hedges. "It has bacteria like a cow's to help it digest cellulose and it has an enzyme like a cow's to extract nutrients from the bacteria."

"Those people understood the idea of what machines need to know," says Jim Stover. To him, 2001: A Space Odysseyis "one of the greatest movies ever." He says, "For the real identification of the problem, you can't beat Hal."

The early universe, astronomers tell us, was a very smooth place, its matter and energy spread out uniformly like a pea-soup fog. Nowadays, it contains both airy voids and huge, dense structures: galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, and clusters upon clusters ad infinitum.

How did all this variety take shape?

Over at the Senate, maybe 12 senators have public mailboxes. Senator Edward M. Kennedy is one (senator@kennedy.senate.gov),

It has been 18 years since I arrived at Penn State for the fall 1977 semester. It had never been my intention to get a Ph.D., yet there I was, somewhat embarrassed, poised to begin a very unconventional path towards a doctorate. I had come to join the newly formed Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities.

On the one hand, you have engineering, with die-cast steel turning through measured arcs, while in the distance loom massive spans of reinforced concrete, every angle, every curve, and every pound mathematically accounted for. On the other hand, you have biology, with its fragile, wriggling, willful microstructures, tough to observe, tough to explain, and just plain messy. A casual observer would be hard-put to find a friendly place for the hard edges and soft membranes of these disciplines to meet.

Where exactly is hyperspace?

I mean, it's all over the place, right?

It's the alternate reality you blast into on "Star Wars" when there's an Empire warship on your tail, the wormhole you dive through on "Sliders" when you're on a mission to change history.

If you visit Kathryn Lilly in Penn State's Powder Injection Molding Lab, she won't tell you that her student, Ed Pinger, is playing with toys. "We're designing specialized robot end effectors," she says, but it's easy to misunderstand.

An end effector is nothing more than a tool in this case, one fitted onto the end of a robotic arm. Pinger, inspired by a toy he found last year, has built one to retrieve parts from an injection molding machine.