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The Apocalyse is Coming: What You Need to Pack Crisis schmisis. It’s nothing more than a crisis of consumer confidence. But what happens in a real crisis, the kind where the world stops working, the electricity stops working and (gasp) the internet stops working? What might you need? Consulting my huge back catalog of post-apocalyptic science fiction, I came up with the following list of true essentials.

They came over the prairie in their pickup trucks, in the cool, quiet hours before dawn. They rolled through the gentle foothills of the Ozarks in air-conditioned tour buses with paintings of stagecoaches airbrushed on the black-lacquered side panels. They came wearing mud-smudged 10-gallon hats and frayed John Deere baseball caps. And then they stepped down out of their vehicles, each one of these farmers, and set foot on holy ground.

It is here, on the rust-colored loam of Stark City, Missouri (population 156), that Kip Cullers became the soybean king of the world. In 2007, Cullers harvested 155 bushels of soybeans per acre from a small plot—eclipsing his own world record of 139. (The US average is 40.) It is also here, on another section of his 11,000-acre farm in 2007, that Cullers grew 329 bushels of corn per acre—not a world record but enough for a top prize at the National Corn Yield Contest.

Cullers is 44. He is a devout Baptist who named his two sons Noah and Naaman after people in the Old Testament. He is thin—rail thin—and carries the twitchy, antic vibe of an early David Byrne. He blinks constantly and has a habit of furrowing his brow. When he takes a dip of chewing tobacco, he taps his tin of Copenhagen twice, quickly. The farmers have come here from Nebraska and Minnesota and Arkansas to behold his work. Cullers' success has made him a celebrity in the farming world. At conferences and conventions across the US and Canada, he gives speeches to crowds of thousands. He has taken his road show to Argentina and Chile. Missouri governor Matt Blunt has sonorously proclaimed him "the Babe Ruth" of soybean production. Cullers calls himself "an ignorant hillbilly," but there's no doubt he's a genius in the science of yield—and, some argue, a frontline warrior in the burgeoning global food crisis.

With demand for corn-based ethanol mounting, and China's and India's hunger for corn-fed chicken and beef climbing, the cost of staple foods has never been higher. The price of yellow corn has doubled over the past two years, and poor people worldwide are struggling. Thirty-three nations are now at risk for social unrest due to rising food prices, according to World Bank president Robert Zoellick. In Thailand, rice farmers guard their paddies at night. Last spring, in Haiti, five people died in a weeklong food riot that culminated with protestors storming the presidential palace.

This upheaval represents an opportunity for companies like Iowa-based Pioneer Hi-Bred, Cullers' main sponsor. A DuPont subsidiary, Pioneer grossed $3.3 billion in 2007, primarily from the sale of bioengineered seeds; its chief rival, Monsanto, topped $11 billion in 2008. These businesses are based on the promise that science can help farmers boost yield. "We have to feed the world," says William Niebur, Pioneer's vice president of crop genetics R&D, "and we can, by increasing productivity per acre. And if we bring people food, there will be political stability, which leads to economic growth."

Cullers has positioned himself as a liaison between Big Biotech and the farming community. "Kip believes that high yield is his mission, his role," Niebur says, "and so he shares what he learns. He talks with us at Pioneer; he talks with other farmers. It's like he's trying to create a Linux users' group for corn and soybeans. He's open source."

So open that he's hosting some 1,800 farmers in Stark City for Kip Cullers' Record Breaking Field Day. Sponsored by Pioneer and German chemical conglomerate BASF, the event is meant as an opportunity for Cullers to pass on his wisdom—and sing the praises of Pioneer's products.

Cullers walks across the grounds and through the huge wedding-style tents, surrounded by a phalanx of Pioneer reps who confer with him soberly in their matching gold polo shirts. Even at his own party, he seems distant, inscrutable. He inspires wonder. "He's doing shit with soybeans that a lot of us aren't," says Jeff Mezera, a corn farmer from Bagley, Wisconsin.

Eventually, a crowd gathers in the tent dubbed Kip's Conference Room, and Cullers strides to the mic. He's chatty and casual. He jokes that one gold-shirted muckety-muck is "Pioneer's vice president for complaints." He spits a stream of chaw onto the grass and says, "If you got any complaints, you talk to him." Then things get down to the fine details of tending the land. One farmer asks Cullers, "What are your P and K levels?"

Signs identify the Pioneer seed varieties Cullers has planted.
Photo: Beth Perkins

Cullers assiduously logs his phosphorus and potassium levels, and he seems to be combing his brain for the numbers. But then he opts for discretion, more Bill Gates than Linus Torvalds. "They're good," he says, jauntily. "My P and K levels are good."

Competitive corn growing dates to the middle of the 19th century, when America's civic leaders, seeking to instill discipline and industry in children, began hosting contests. A 1951 book titled The 4-H Story describes "young Franklin B. Spaulding" of East Otto, New York, as he stood by his collection of Dutton Yellow corn in 1856: "His pulse must have quickened with sudden, overwhelming triumph when the party of dignified judges, passing by the other exhibitors, walked up to him and handed him 50 dollars as first prize in the state corn contest."

Grown-ups got into the contests, too. Francis Childs, who died in 2008 at age 68, was the most controversial of the competitive corn growers. In 2002, he stunned the Farm Belt with a new world record, growing 442 bushels of corn per acre on his farm in Manchester, Iowa. Like Cullers, Childs lectured throughout the Midwest. He espoused growing techniques that were then revolutionary—super-deep plowing, for instance, and high-dosage fertilizing.

But in 2003, during a nasty divorce, Childs' wife charged that he had cheated earlier that year when the National Corn Growers Association came to weigh his crops. "He parked wagons out there that already had corn in them," Lois Childs testified, "and you're supposed to have empty wagons."

Once the province of a few fanatics, more cost-effective chemicals and seeds have led to a boom in competitive farming. In 2007, the number of entrants in the National Corn Yield Contest, steady at about 3,000 for years, soared to nearly 5,000. Last year, it was 6,700. Everyone still wonders: Is 442-bushel corn actually possible, or was Childs a fraud?

At Kip Cullers' Record Breaking Field Day, a solemn respect for the dead prevails. "Francis was a good man," says Dave Knau, a Pioneer sales administrator. "He was a personal friend." But the new king of corn is more cautious. "I ain't even gonna talk about Francis Childs," Cullers says. "I ain't even gonna mention Francis Childs' name."

The relationship between Cullers and Pioneer benefits both. The company provides him tiny batches of prototype seeds. "They'll just give me a handful," he tells me, cupping his palms together, "and maybe there'll only be 10 times that much in the whole world. It's not for any Joe Blow; they only give it to the cream of the crop—you know, the top farmers."

In exchange, Pioneer gets detailed field reports from an obsessed autodidact. Cullers never went to college, but he rises at 3:30 each morning to study plant genetics online. Right now, he's urging Pioneer to genetically weave a bit of stiffening fiber into soybean stalks. Cullers plants 300,000 soybeans per acre, double the national average. In these super-dense fields, he explains, soy plants grow taller, fighting for sunlight. "They fall down a lot," he says, "and you lose photosynthesis. The trifoliates don't pump nutrients to the beans. And you get disease, too. It's crowded and humid out there, down low."

Cullers learned farming as a kid. His stepfather was a dairy farmer who kept 50 cows on a 400-acre spread, but it was his small patches of corn that thrilled Cullers most. "Corn's my passion," he says with a rare flourish of lyricism. "Soybeans are my backup plan, but corn, it's a robust plant. It's something you gotta mature for a long time. It's a challenge: Basically, you have one week every year when you can't screw it up—mid-June, when it's tasseling and pollinating and everything counts. That week is exciting. It feels like the start of a race."

Cullers remembers hiking around his stepdad's farm to check on tasseling corn. At night, he would fall asleep dreaming of perfect corn—10 feet tall, with two ears on every plant and each ear sprouting a kingly 50 rings of 20 kernels.

Pioneer provides Cullers with tiny batches of prototype seeds; in exchange, he supplies the company with detailed field reports.
Photo: Beth Perkins

In his twenties and thirties, Cullers farmed 5,000 acres of vegetables. Every field had to be hand hoed. He oversaw 150 seasonal workers until once, he told me, "we screwed up. We sent a live mouse down there to a baby food company along with our squash. They dumped like thousands of cases of baby food. They was scared they had rodent hairs in them."

Cullers tightened his operation. "I'm a micromanager," he says. "I'm a control freak. My wife thinks I'm stressed out. All I do every day now, all day long, is crisis management. With corn and soybeans, you've got your highest yield potential on the first day you plant. After that"—his tone grows wistful—"things start going wrong. I can walk through a field and find 5,000 things wrong with it. You're always dealing with something hypercritical, like an infestation of Japanese beetles. I work six days a week, right up until it gets dark, and when she's balls to the wall, I work Sundays, too."

Cullers adjusts his cap and stares off into the distance dolefully—trapped, it seems, by his own success. He has become the Grow Man, the superstar of bionic ag, and now he seems resolved to do whatever the role demands. When a BASF film crew approaches him later in the day seeking a sound bite, he dutifully plays along.

"We want employees to know you are pleased to be working with BASF," the producer tells him.

How does Kip do it? That's the question on everyone's mind at the field day, of course. Cullers doesn't just put seeds in the ground and hope for the best. Modern farming is science, awash in crazily capable machinery and in technicalities that can befuddle the average farmer of a few hundred acres. Cullers himself owns some 15 tractors, the fanciest of which costs $185,000 and steers itself with GPS tech. He burns up thousands of cell phone minutes each month talking to Pioneer and BASF technical advisers—chemistry PhDs who can expound on the relative merits of Respect insecticide, formulated from zeta-cypermethrin, and `, which is rich in pyraclostrobin.

Dozens of these experts are on hand for the field day. They set up little teaching stations and stand there—in the 90-degree heat, in stagnant air as humid as an athletic sock—explicating Cullers' strategies. At one station, BASF sales rep Dale Ashby extols Cullers' unusually high herbicide use. "What Kip does, to get early-season weed pressure out of the way," he says, "is spray an herbicide before he plants. Kip likes Extreme, and also Pursuit."

Then there are the seeds themselves. Leon Streit, a senior research scientist at Pioneer, touts the lab development of his company's new high-yield Y Series soybeans. Until recently, geneticists have focused on "defensive" genes such as rhg1, which resists soybean cyst nematodes. But in creating the Y beans, Pioneer scientists sought out "offensive" genes—the very material that makes soybeans sprout and grow.

They did so, in part, by employing an ancient agriculture tactic: They took crosses of elite soybean plants and inbred them with thousands of experimental varieties, each with a distinct genetic makeup. They calculated the yield from each progeny—and then they got fancy. Using DNA fingerprinting technology, Pioneer scanned the genes in each plant to determine which correlated with yield. "We were originally looking for a specific yield gene," Pioneer senior research scientist Scott Sebastian says, "but yield doesn't work that way. We learned that it's a complex interaction of many traits and the environment." Pioneer's promotional literature claims that Y Series beans will help farms increase yield by 40 percent over the next decade.

In 2007, on a section of his 11,000-acre farm Cullers grew 329 bushels of corn per acre — not a world record but enough for a top prize at the National Corn Yield Contest.
Photo: Beth Perkins

Still, the Y beans aren't the most celebrated genetically modified product at the field day. Under one tent, guarded 24/7 by the Newton County police, is a small blue plastic tub containing four stalks of corn. The plants appear ordinary, but they sprouted from seeds that feature a patented, proprietary, and as yet unreleased Pioneer trait, Optimum GAT. It makes them resistant to not one but two types of pesticide—glyphosate, a popular weed killer that Monsanto sells as Roundup, as well as a whole family of chemicals known as ALS herbicides.

Pioneer created Optimum GAT in a Redwood City, Calfornia, lab by splicing a bacterium called Bacillus licheniformis into corn and soy genes. The company hails the trait as a deft response to a big problem in agriculture: the proliferation of weeds that, over years, have built up a resistance to herbicides.

Optimum GAT, with its "shuffled" genes, closely resembles bioengineered seeds that Monsanto has been creating for more than a decade. And its principal magic, it seems, is economic: Currently, Monsanto holds the patent to the sole glyphosate-resistant technology, Roundup Ready. Pioneer pays Monsanto tens of millions of dollars a year to license Roundup Ready—and as Cullers puts it, Optimum GAT "will free us all from a certain company in St. Louis."

But for all the wonders of Pioneer's laboratories, the real secret to Cullers' success might be more prosaic. Kendall Lamkey, the Pioneer distinguished chair in maize breeding and the agronomy department head at Iowa State University, doesn't dismiss chemicals, but he feels that technology is not the ultimate answer. "With Kip," he says, "it basically comes down to elbow grease. He walks his contest plots daily. He's checking his soy plants to avoid flower abortion. He keeps his plants cool by spraying a thin mist when it's hot. He pays close attention—that's what a good farmer does. The work hasn't really changed much over the decades."

On the last day, the heat breaks and rain comes gushing down out of the sky in torrents. It is almost biblical: Everywhere you walk, it seems, there is a raging stream with a soggy black Optimum GAT-branded baseball hat floating in it. The guests gather in "Kip's Cafeteria," where local Mennonite women, dressed in prim white aprons and hairnets, dish up lunch. The farmers are mostly gone by now, leaving the Pioneer reps and their BASF counterparts. They sit together, addressing their pork chops and blueberry pie, and speculate hopefully about the future of high-yield agriculture.

"I talked to Kip last night," murmurs Pioneer senior marketing manager Tracy Linbo, "and he said that 200-bushel soybeans are not outside the realm of possibility."

Later, Cullers sits alone in the cafeteria tent, wearing a BASF polo shirt and a pair of Big Smith overalls so baggy he practically disappears in them. The place is a mess, scattered with muddy paper plates and pork bones. "I'm wore out," he says. "At a thing like this, everyone's always tugging at you. I don't know if we ever want to do this again. I've got 5 million things to do." He cracks out his cell and begins making rapid-fire calls. The whole of one message is, "Hey Bruce, give me a holler."

I ask him if he has any qualms about using genetically modified seeds given the controversy surrounding them. "No," he says.

Cullers twists his legs up toward him awkwardly, so that the front feet of his chair are resting on the toes of his boots. He stares at me, waiting.

"You know that passage in Genesis," I say, "the one about taking 'dominion' over 'all the earth'? Does that inspire you?"

"No," he says. "I don't think about that." He looks out toward his corn now. "Corn is my hobby. Some people go fishing. Some people ride bicycles. I grow corn. All I ever wanted to do was grow stuff. I love making stuff grow. I love seeing how far you can push it." He's possessed of a rare simplicity, a purity of focus that exists, usually, only in athletes—in people who spend their whole life in pursuit of perfection and glory.

I say good-bye and drive off over a long, straight gravel road. Corn lines my path. It is high and green in its rows, and I can't even imagine what sort of strange magic these fields will sprout in the future.

Bill Donahue (billdonahue.net), a writer based in Portland, Oregon, has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards.

Every year, we see scores of innovations trickle onto the web — everything from new browser features to cool web apps to entire programming languages. Some of these concepts just make us smile, then we move on. Some completely blow our minds with their utility and ingenuity — and become must-haves.

For this list, we've compiled the most truly life-altering nuggets of brilliance to hit center stage in 2008: the ideas, products and enhancements to the web experience so huge that they make us wonder how we got along without them.

Nitpickers will notice that a couple of these technologies arrived two or three years ago. Others aren't even fully baked yet. But each innovation on our list reached a level of maturity, hit the point of critical mass, or stepped in to fill a burning need during 2008 that resulted in it significantly changing the landscape of the web.

Here's to the technologies currently making the web a better place than it was 12 months ago.

Few things carry more value than your digital identity, and yet most web users have only a tenuous grasp of it. That's because on the social web, identity is no longer just who you are. It's who you know, how you know them and how much you want them to know about you. On the web, your identity is explicitly tied to your relationships, both with your friends and with the websites you visit.

These ID systems all offer a way to take control of your social capital, that cache of "friend data" you carry with you as you sign up for and use different web services. They also all offer a more tangible advantage — an easy way to log in to any website using one set of credentials. You get one virtual ID card that gives you access to hundreds of websites. As a bonus, you don't have to go through the painful process of filling out a profile and adding or approving friends on every new blog, community or social network you want to join.

The end of 2008 saw a flurry of activity around identity. Facebook Connect, which currently lets you log in to a few dozen high-profile websites using your Facebook ID, went live the first week of December. Google's Friend Connect and MySpace's MySpaceID, similar systems that aren't yet as widely adopted, launched soon after it.

There's a hitch, though. Facebook Connect, while elegant and easy to use, is built on proprietary code and isn't compatible with the offerings from Google and MySpace, which are built using OpenID and other open source standards.

We should expect this battle for your personal data play out over the next year, maybe longer. But 2008 will be remembered as the year that identity stepped into the spotlight.

One of the most important technologies on this list doesn't fully exist yet — HTML 5 — but in 2008, key features started to trickle out.

HTML 5 will eventually replace HTML 4.01, the dominant programming language currently used to build web pages. But the governing bodies in charge of the web are still drafting the details, and nobody expects HTML 5 to fully emerge as the new standard for at least a few more years.

But HTML 5 is no vaporware. Many of the changes to the way the web operates as outlined in early versions of the new specification are already being implemented in the latest browsers, and some of the web's more adventurous site builders are already incorporating HTML 5's magic into their pages.

HTML 5 will be great step forward, standardizing things like dragging and dropping elements on web pages, in-line editing of text and images on sites and new ways of drawing animations. There's also support for audio and video playback without plug-ins, a boon for usability and a worrisome sign for Adobe's Flash, Microsoft's Silverlight and Apple's QuickTime. The language will also give a boost to web apps, as there are new controls for storing web data offline on your local machine.

Want Gmail on your desktop? HTML 5 makes it possible. Alas, the blink tag isn't invited to the party.

A new breed of social app has arisen to help us manage the mess of information overload — the lifestream.

Not long ago, keeping track of your friends on the internet was pretty easy. Everyone belonged to Friendster or MySpace and that was it. Now, the web is littered with thousands of social sites, each with its own special purpose — Flickr for photos, Last.fm for music, Twitter for tweeting. Even the most rudimentary services are tied to the social web. Renting a movie, buying a book or writing a blog post? Let all your friends on Netflix, Amazon and Blogger know about it.

Sites like FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and Digsby serve as social-network-activity aggregators. They're like virtual funnels. Dump in all the notifications, feeds and updates from your various networks, and the services will bring it all into one master stream, relieving you of the responsibility of visiting a dozen or more sites to learn what your friends are up to, what they're listening to, who they're snogging and so on. Controls let you dial back the flow by sorting and filtering the flow, pruning it down to only what matters most.

Many such services have emerged, but FriendFeed, an elegant and simple site designed by a crew of ex-Googlers, is our favorite.

Oh, and don't expect to be able to add Facebook to your lifestream. The network lets all sorts of data in, but precious little out.

Firefox has been around since 2004, but when version 3 of Mozilla's browser arrived in June 2008, it got everything right. Mozilla's browser is faster and more secure than ever before, and it's open source, so you get the feel-good factor, too.

One of the most highly anticipated software releases of the year, more than 8 million people downloaded Firefox 3 on the first day. Third time's a charm, indeed.

The genius bit of engineering was bringing search front and center — just type what you're looking for in the location bar, and FF3 searches your history, bookmarks and the web to bring you the page you want, lightning fast.

Performance enhancements made it one of the web's fastest browsers — especially for surfing the recent swell of web apps — and improved security features made it one of the safest.

Mozilla continues to build upon the concept with its Ubiquity add-on for Firefox, which lets you search and interact with any number of web services by typing text commands into the browser.

It's still the second-most-popular browser after Microsoft Internet Explorer by a wide margin, but Firefox 3 is the feisty favorite of the web's elite.

Its debut release in September was not expected, nor was it greeted with as much fanfare as the arrival of Firefox 3 a few months prior. But Google's browser was instantly recognized as a potential game-changer, both among browser-makers and within the world of web apps.

Its killer feature is a new approach to page rendering that isolates web applications inside each of the browser's tabs — a crashing web app might cause a single tab to go south, but that won't affect anything outside that tab. The rest of the browser remains stable.

When you're doing mission-critical work in a web app and the browser crashes, it isn't an annoyance, it's a deal breaker. E-mails are lost, documents have to be rewritten, web forms need to be filled out again. Chrome's ability to sidestep a full crash strengthens Google's bid to replace desktop apps with its own web-based alternatives.

Chrome reached official 1.0 status in December. It's Windows-only for now, but we should expect official versions for Mac and Linux soon. It's also still very young. Future releases will have support for add-ons, offline syncing of web data through Google Desktop and — knowing Google — probably a few other bells and whistles nobody's thought of yet.

In 2008, location-based information ceased being a fancy add-on and instead became a requirement of any serious, successful web service.

Hit a button on your laptop or phone to tell a web service where you are, and it tells you what restaurants are close by, where the new Bond movie is playing (and when, and if there are tickets left), and which of your friends are within shouting distance if you need a date.

The tipping point arguably came when a wave of GPS-equipped mobile web devices hit the market. The iPhone 3G, the T-Mobile G1 and the latest Nokia N-series devices all have GPS built in. They also all have real web browsers and the tools necessary for access to web APIs, opening the door to more-relevant search and localized mobile services.

On the iPhone, you can use Yelp's app to get a list of nearby venues, restaurants and hangouts with the touch of a button. Or, in the case of Google's local-search app, you can simply speak your request and get local results. An app like Say Where queries multiple search sites.

The benefits aren't limited to mobiles, either. Social networking sites and desktop search apps can take advantage of new technologies like Yahoo's FireEagle, where users can update and store their location data, or browser plug-ins like Google Gears or Firefox's Geode, which users can set up to report their location automatically.

Whether they're using a desktop browser or an iPhone, users now demand the high levels of relevance and convenience on the web that location awareness affords.

The World Wide Web Consortium, the web's governing body, has stepped up and formed a think tank to develop a set of standards for handling users' geodata that ensures privacy and interoperability. The W3C Geolocation Working Group hopes to have its first recommendation filed by the end of 2009.

Welcome to Wired's 11th annual Vaporware Awards, our annual roundup of the tech industry's biggest, brashest and most baffling unfulfilled promises.

This year, handset makers were exhaling more vapor than anyone — eager to compete with the iPhone and to cash in on the excitement around Android and GPS-enabled services, the mobile sector was ripe with empty vows. Gamers had it rough again this year, too, as several key titles failed to ship on time.

We selected from readers' submissions the top 10 products that were supposed to ship in 2008 but ended up delayed, derailed or otherwise rendered in absentia. Hardware, software, games and vehicles were all fair game. Beta releases count, but as in years past, we gave Gmail a pass — it's branded "beta," but it's widely used by millions. Like "Google" and "Twitter," "Gmail" has even become a verb.

A surprisingly high percentage of last year's winners actually shipped this year (Chinese Democracy, the Tesla Roadster and the world's most expensive and useless keyboard among them), clearing the decks for a whole new stack of suckage.

Home was originally announced in March 2007, but was repeatedly sidelined. And now that it’s kinda here, it's woefully incomplete. Promised features like video sharing are absent, Sony has removed voice chat until further notice, and users from different countries can't interact with one another — a major problem for an international platform.

Home doesn't even succeed as a Second Life rip-off, owing to the fact that there simply isn't much to do. You can walk around in the mall and spend real money on virtual clothes branded with advertisements, or you can hang out at the bowling alley and play crappy video games. That's about it. Even the avatar creation system is incredibly scaled-down.

Sony keeps promising Home will get more features later, relying on the "it's only a beta" line whenever somebody points out that it is a completely useless piece of crap that no one would ever use.

But the pirate's dream appliance remains a pipe dream, and it looks likely to stay that way. As reader Chris Lindley points out, Myka's website is still taking pre-orders, even though the user forums are overrun with spam and requests for refunds.

Even if it eventually arrives, the Myka's missed the boat. Any potential customers have already picked up the like-minded HD set-top box from Popcorn Hour, or they just bought Apple TVs and installed Boxee.

The hold-up seems to be that development focus has shifted from the game itself to its engine, HeroEngine, which Simutronics has licensed out. Bioware is using it to power its upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic.

As reader Kuro suggests, "If Old Republic gets released before Hero's Journey, that will probably be the final nail in the game's vaporware coffin."

At an estimated $60,000, Zap's ZAP-X EV SUV may not be all that affordable, but it's an important step towards an alt fuel future. The all-electric SUV promises a 350-mile range, 644 horsepower, a top speed of 155mph — the power of a Porsche Cayenne at around half the price, and only costing around a penny per mile to drive.

Originally promised for 2008, the ZAP-X's arrival has been pushed back to 2010. But even experts question Zap's ability to pump out an electric with such sexy specs before the end of the decade.

"This is vaporware," Aaron Bragman, an auto industry analyst at Global Insight, told Wired.com earlier this year. "I'd take it with a grain of salt."

"Guaranteed to make you sick of looking at other people's crappy quality family photo albums," says reader Grady Root.

But while Microvision generated lots of buzz for its tiny "Pico P" laser light device at CES in January 2008, it hasn’t yet shown up.

So far, all we've seen are hyped-up reviews of prototypes. Meanwhile, other companies, including Toshiba, have managed to ship their own pico projectors this year.

Microvision has since partnered with Motorola to build a phone with a built-in projector. Hello Vaporware 2010?

The n√�vifone was first announced in January of 2008, boasting a list of features to make map-geeks drool: preloaded world maps, real-time traffic stats, Google Maps and local search. Plus, a built-in camera that automatically geo-tags photos, integration with Google Panaramio photo sharing services and voice-prompted directions. There's even a feature that pinpoints the place on the map where you last removed the n√�vifone from its dashboard mount so you'll always remember where you parked.

But the promised release date of Q3 2008 came and went, and the n√�vifone is now expected during the first half of 2009.

Says disappointed reader Elio Manetti: "I don't believe anymore it will ever be released."

The boys and girls in Wired's Gadget Lab were ready to write off the n√�vifone, believing it would never ship, until documents suggesting it is currently being tested by the FCC surfaced on the web.

Much like the company's wildly successful Warcraft III, StarCraft II will let users edit campaigns, create their own maps and modify the game play to their hearts' content.

Sounds like a doozy, but so far, it's a snoozy. StarCraft II has been in development since 2003, was teased and demoed throughout 2007, promised in 2008, and now it's been pushed back until at least 2009.

Reader Ray Keller is fed up with the wait. "I'm stuck watching the videogame elite play on YouTube," he writes.

Says reader John Epperson: "I'm not the only one who has been waiting for this installment for more than five years!! And I'm not even a Starcraft fanboy!"

Bad enough that Blizzard has a slow, methodical "It's ready when it's ready" attitude, the company has now announced the game will be carved up into several pieces that will be sold separately.

So, we wait forever for the game to come out, and then when it finally does, it'll just be a first installment?! Grrr...

Which makes the first Android phone, T-Mobile's G1, that much more of a bummer. An Android phone could be so much more than a clunky iPhone knockoff with a slide-out keyboard. There are nine major handset manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance, and all of them are committed to bringing out Android phones. So where are they already?

There is one beacon of hope from down under. Australian company Kogan Technologies plans to release the Agora, the world's first non-G1 Google phone, in January of 2009. We look forward to reading the reviews on our iPhones.

And continue to look forward they shall. After pegging the browser for a late 2008 ship date, Microsoft has pushed its estimated arrival back into 2009. The browser is currently available as a public beta, and the first release candidate was sent out for private testing in December. The betas look great, but final code is still months away — cold comfort for OEMs and corporations who can't adopt a new browser until it's been thoroughly tested and approved.

Meanwhile, older versions of IE continue to instill fear in IT managers and web developers everywhere as new security flaws pop up and new compatibility problems are exposed.

Hurry up, Microsoft. Countless Windows desktops need IE8 badly. Come to their rescue before they all wise up and switch to Firefox.

After some twelve (12!) years in development, we had given up all hope of ever seeing Duke Nukem Forever hit the shelves. We even held a high-level meeting in the Wired newsroom where we agreed to end the agony and, some vague promises to the press about a 2008 release notwithstanding, leave Duke off the Vaporware list this year. Even the best jokes get old eventually.

Says reader Dennis Murphy: "My nominations for DNF got printed in 2001 & 2002. Here we are, 7 years later, and it's still on the list. How about one more chance? If we don't see it by 2010, I promise I'll stop submitting! (Well, at least till my grandkids are born ...)"

But then, in May, Jace Hall of Crackle.com scored an on-camera interview with the Dukefathers, George Broussard and Scott Miller of 3-D Realms. At the end of their sit-down, the DNF developers even let him demo an actual, working version of the game.

The resulting hand-held footage of the first-person shooter was all the proof we needed — the game is still inching towards reality. So congrats, Duke. You're the King of Vaporware once again.

When pressed to explain the delay, Broussard and Miller, aside from blaming "hookers and cocaine," offer a classic excuse. "There's a lot of mistakes and lessons we had to learn," Broussard says. "But most of all, there's also been a lot of World of Warcraft."

OK guys, we get it. You love playing games so much, you can't be bothered to finish building your own. Put down the bong and get it DONE.

On a late fall afternoon on the western edge of the Netherlands, coastal engineer Marcel Stive stands atop a 40-foot dune. He stares out beyond the posse of wet-suit-clad surfers wading into the breakers of the North Sea. Where the surfers see inviting waves, Stive sees dry land—and a distant storm. He points south toward Rotterdam, Europe's busiest port. Arm outstretched, Stive rotates 180 degrees to face the shoreline running north. "As far as you can see, in both directions, we're going to push the coast out 3, maybe 4, kilometers," he says. "We have to—to keep the water out."

The dunes here alongside the village of Ter Heijde are among the weakest links in the complex network of natural barriers, dams, levees, canals, pumps, and storm-surge barricades that keep this lowest of low countries dry. More than half of the Netherlands sits below sea level, and if a megastorm were to break through these not-so-formidable dunes, the water could inundate Rotterdam and surrounding cities within 24 hours, flooding thousands of square miles, paralyzing the nation's economy, and devastating an area inhabited by more than 2 million people.

Global warming is a cause for serious concern in low-lying countries. The Dutch aren't waiting for a catastrophe; they're taking measures to solve the problem now.

For more, visit wired.com/video.

Stive is part of a Dutch team charged with reducing that risk. Narrowing the gap between the Netherlands and North America by a couple of miles would be a start, and as a bonus it would create valuable new real estate for recreation and development. Also on the drawing board are massive new storm-surge barriers and reinforcements around cities like Rotterdam and Dordrecht, built on the marshy delta where the Rhine and Meuse rivers meet the sea. "If you see a certain future, you must react," Stive says. And as he sees it, that future looks wet.

More than half of the Netherlands sits below sea level, and if a massive storm were to break through the dunes, Rotterdam would be inundated in 24 hours. Photo: Ralph Hargarten

Yet the chance of a breach at Ter Heijde is actually quite low, about 1 in 10,000 in any given year. (In the lingo of storm protection, that's known as a 10,000-year flood.) The coastline and river deltas of the Netherlands are arguably the best-protected lowlands in the world, and the Dutch are a little miffed at Al Gore for suggesting in An Inconvenient Truth that their homeland is as vulnerable to rising seas as far less protected places like Bangladesh and Florida.

To Stive and other sea-rise hawks, however, 1 in 10,000 has become too risky. They want to crank up defenses in some critical areas to the level of 1 in 100,000. "To understand risk, you must consider the value of what would be lost," says Stive, a pink-faced man of 57 years who heads the coastal engineering and water research centers at Delft University of Technology, just north of Rotterdam. The half of the country that is below sea level—including the area behind these dunes—generates about 65 percent of its GDP. That's nearly $450 billion a year.

A deadly flood hit the Netherlands in 1953, covering more than 600 square miles and killing more than 1,800 people.
Photos: Getty Images

There is, of course, another factor to take into account: Global warming is increasing the odds of a catastrophic breach. That means the risk calculations need revamping. New projections of sea-level rise and other potential consequences of climate change, coupled with the aftershock from Hurricane Katrina, have prompted Dutch officials to ask a very big question: What would it take to climate-proof our country for the next 200 years?

In 2007, the parliament assigned a team of experts, dubbed the Delta Committee, to come up with an answer. The group's final report, published in September, proposes a combination of aggressive new steps—extending the coastline and building surge barriers—and time-tested strategies like fortifying levees. The cost: about $1.5 billion a year for the next 100 years.

Of course, a 200-year plan seems absurd. Two centuries ago, it would have been impossible to predict how civilization and the planet would look today. But the Dutch insist that the project is prudent and rational. If they start now, the costs will be minimized and disaster, perhaps, averted. After centuries of damming, pumping, barricading, and redirecting water, the Dutch water masters are laying the foundations for what may be the most ambitious act of territorial defense in history. In so doing, they are giving engineers and urban planners from New Orleans to Singapore a preview of what it will take to keep rising waters at bay. "We have the safest river delta in the world," Stive says. And, he adds, they want to keep it that way: "We will completely control the water."

Floods may be among today's more ominous climate-driven hazards, but the Dutch know better than anyone that they're nothing new. Below a bridge crowded with bicycles in the groovy Amsterdam neighborhood of Jordan, canal boats full of beer-soaked vacationers glide past a heavy black gate. On the side of the bridge is a small block of white marble, high above the waterline, with a horizontal cut across the middle. It shows the high-water mark of 1682 and is accompanied by an inscription reading, Zee dyks hooghte zynde negen voet vyf duym voven stadtspeyl.Translation: The sea dike level is 9 feet 5 thumbs above city level.

The 327-year-old gauge is high and dry today because in 1932 Amsterdam's labyrinth of canals was sealed off from the ocean by the 19-mile-long Afsluitdijk (Enclosure Dam). That feat of engineering created Lake Ijssel, one of the largest freshwater lakes in Europe. It also cut Amsterdam off from tidal changes and storm surges, permanently lowering the city's waterline.

Some 3 billion people—at least half the world's population—live in coastal areas vulnerable to the worst effects of global warming: harsher storms, rising sea levels, flooded deltas in winter, parched deltas in summer, and less sensational but equally serious problems like salt water infiltration of underground aquifers. By 2025, when the human population reaches 8.5 billion, the number of coastal dwellers is expected to be closer to 6 billion.

Marcel Stive, coastal engineer for the Delta Committee
Photo: Ralph Hargarten

Success in holding back the sea has earned the Dutch an international reputation as experts in reclamation and flood protection. But that knowledge has been acquired through painful experience. In February 1953, a massive storm surge inundated 600 to 800 square miles of the country, killing 1,835 people. After the disaster, the government devised a plan so that the people of the Netherlands could confidently say: never again.

The initiative triggered a 30-year campaign of bulwark construction, known as the Delta Works, to reduce the country's flood vulnerabilities. Dams and levees were built to cut tidal areas off from the open ocean, shortening the exposed coastline by nearly 450 miles. The flagship projects are the 22-year-old Oosterschelde storm-surge barrier and the 11-year-old Maeslant barrier, a gate made up of two giant arms, each nearly the size of the Eiffel Tower. In the event of calamity-level storm waters, the barrier will close off the mouth of the New Waterway leading into Rotterdam.

The megastructures are impressive, but what may prove to be the most visionary aspect of the Delta Works is the statistical approach that guided the designs. How high should we build the levees? How strong should a surge barrier be? The Dutch decided to base their answers to these questions not merely on the fact that storms are destructive and the Netherlands low, but also on economics. With the help of renowned Dutch mathematician David van Dantzig, the 1953 task force calculated safety levels using an equation that is now seared into the minds of Dutch engineers:

This kind of risk analysis is common today in fields like nuclear power, aerospace, and chemical manufacturing. But back in the 1950s, accounting for the projected cost of damage when developing flood protection was novel. The power of this simple formula is that it produces economically rational public-safety decisions: Less value, less protection. Dutch law now requires this principle to be used to determine the strength of flood defenses throughout the country. Since the dunes at Ter Heijde sit between the sea and a vulnerable but economically vibrant area, a safety level of 1:100,000 is called for. More rural parts of the country require safety levels of just 1:1,250 or lower.

In a Rotterdam office built atop a levee on the New Meuse river, Cees Veerman is sketching lines on a map of the Netherlands. A farmer-economist-politician, Veerman is the head of the new Delta Committee. He was only 4 years old the night of the 1953 flood, but he remembers his grandfather racing into the kitchen to grab a knife. "He was about to run out and cut the cattle loose and move them to higher ground," Veerman recalls. The townspeople in his South Holland village of Nieuw-Beijerland assumed the storm waters would rise gradually. Instead, a wall of water bulldozed through the dikes. Their lives were in danger, but there was little to do except pray. Suddenly, the water level began to drop—their prayers had been answered. "Everyone was shouting, 'The water is falling!'" It wasn't a miracle, though; the water had merely barreled through the far-side levees, relieving the buildup at the Veerman family farm while inundating areas farther inland.

To climate-proof the Netherlands for the next two centuries, Veerman and his team first needed to gather the best possible data. Most existing projections of sea-level rise look at the oceans as a whole, not at specific regions. So the Dutch commissioned their own forecasts. Developed by some of the engineers and ocean experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the group that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore), the models predict that the North Sea will rise 40 centimeters by 2050, between 65 centimeters and 1.3 meters by 2100, and up to 4 meters by 2200.

On the drawing board for reducing the risk of flooding are massive new storm-surge barriers and reinforcements around cities like Rotterdam and Dordrecht, built on the marshy delta where the Rhine and Meuse rivers meet the sea. Photo: Ralph Hargarten

Veerman talks about Dutch can-do the way generals talk about staying the course in a prolonged military battle. "People say sea-level rise will push us back into the hinterlands," he says. "We say no, we can manage with 1, 2, even 3 meters. But we have to act." With a black pen, he inks in an expanded coastline on the map laid out before him. Extending the country westward will be a colossal reclamation effort: Dredging ships, working just offshore, would spend the next century vacuuming up roughly 121 million cubic meters of seafloor sand every year and spraying it toward the shoreline, where wave action would then deposit it at the water's edge and "naturally" build the beach outward. Over the course of 100 years, the project would add about 400 square miles to the Netherlands—roughly equivalent to 17 Manhattans.

Next, Veerman sketches in future storm-surge barriers, adds a new channel for diverting the flow of the Lek River, and draws a line connecting a small chain of islands off the northern coast that may someday be linked up to form a giant buffer against the North Sea. He also circles a swatch of farmland near the confluence of the Rhine and Meuse rivers. Global warming doesn't just bring a threat from the ocean; greater precipitation in the Alps is expected to increase the amount of water flowing through Europe's major rivers, raising the flood hazard from within. Veerman explains how this circled area will be converted back into wetlands, giving the rivers room to flood in a place that makes sense—not downtown Rotterdam.

Then he brings his pen north to Amsterdam. At present, when water levels in nearby Lake Ijssel get too high, water managers release the excess through the Enclosure Dam and into the sea. Gravity is currently able to move the water during periods of low tide, when sea level falls below that of the lake. But that will stop working as the ocean rises. One option is to pump the water out, but the expense would be prohibitive. Instead, Veerman wants to raise the level of the lake on pace with the sea, as much as 5 feet by 2100.

From the air, you can see why this would be a bitter pill for Amsterdam's booming satellite towns—especially the posh developments along the lakeshore, which would have to be fortified by higher dikes. But the price tag on the proposed lake project, as much as $8.2 billion over the next 100 years, is only a fraction of what it would cost to build and run a pump system or to repair damages if the lake overflowed into 10,000 living rooms.

Today, life around the periphery of Lake Ijssel—and throughout the Netherlands—looks so peaceful, it's hard to envision disaster. Because of that, protests seem inevitable. Environmentalists will no doubt be hostile to the idea of a century-long dredging project, relocated farmers will put up a fight, and condominium owners around the lake may resist anything that interferes with their views. But Veerman and his colleagues are convinced that bold measures now are necessary to prevent calamity tomorrow.

The wind rips through the dark skies above New Orleans. Hurricane Ike is hours from making landfall at Galveston, Texas. New Orleans should receive only a glancing blow, but residents are hardly at ease: Tropical storm and tornado warnings are expected to last through much of this September afternoon and evening. Just two weeks ago, Hurricane Gustav forced an evacuation of 2 million people and pushed the city's unfinished levee system to the brink.

The Maeslant barrier and the Oosterschelde storm surge barrier are the crowning jewels of the Delta Works. Because of the accelerating rise in sea level, the Dutch will have to build additional mega-structures to guard against flooding. Photo: Ralph Hargarten

On the east side of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, Mathijs van Ledden climbs a muddied slope toward a recently constructed flood wall. Behind him are the devastated blocks of the Lower Ninth Ward, an eerie mixture of abandoned lots, weed-covered foundations, and a few refurbished or newly built houses.

The canal connects the Mississippi River to the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and Lake Pontchartrain. The flood wall was built soon after Katrina, to plug what was one of the most catastrophic failure points along the city's roughly 350-mile network of levees and floodwalls. Van Ledden, an engineer with the Dutch consulting firm Haskoning, has been in New Orleans since 2006. His job: Run wave and water models for the US Army Corps of Engineers to help determine the necessary height of new defenses.

Shouting over the wind, Van Ledden, 33, says a stormy day is ideal for touring the city's flood-protection maze. He leans over an older flood wall that runs perpendicular to the new, higher one. Ike has raised the water level in this canal 5 or 6 feet above normal. "During Gustav, the level was all the way up to here," Van Ledden says, placing his hand just below the top of the wall. "And Gustav was just a friendly wake-up call. In 50 years, if the sea level goes up 1 or 1½ feet, the level for that storm would be here," he says, holding his hand well above the top of the flood wall. To make sure that doesn't happen, the Corps is planning to build a giant storm-surge barrier between Lake Borgne and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The barrier's gates would close during extreme storms, blocking lake water from funneling up into this narrow canal.

After Katrina, Congress ordered the Corps to bring the city's hurricane protection system up to 1:100 levels by 2011. If a 1 percent per year chance of system failure sounds high—compared with existing 1:10,000 defenses in the Netherlands—that's because it is. "One-hundred-year protection is quite a risk," Van Ledden says. Statisticians will tell you that over the course of a 30-year mortgage, the chance of a 100-year flood hitting the city is more than 25 percent. The 1:100 standard takes projected sea-level rise into account, but not economic impacts and repair costs. (Hurricane Katrina caused upwards of $150 billion in damage.)

Cees Veerman, head of the Delta Committee
Photo: Ralph Hargarten

So why don't we do it like the Dutch? The glib answer is that we should. Van Ledden and colleagues have run the numbers for New Orleans, and he says investment in a protection level of at least 1:1,000 is economically justifiable in some areas. That is, the cost of boosting protections to that degree is modest in relation to the huge reduction in risk. And if you settle for mediocre defenses and they get wiped out, you also lose your initial expenditure.

But the Dutch model may not work in the US. That's partly because our hurricanes are so severe. Consider this: The levee height required for 1:100 protection in some areas of New Orleans is roughly 30 feet—the same height as fortifications in the Netherlands that provide 1:10,000 protection.

In any case, American politicians could never get away with basing flood barrier specs on the value of what sits behind them. Ratcheting up defense levels in New Orleans to match those in the Netherlands would lead other areas of the Gulf Coast to demand equal treatment. And what about earthquake zones in California, floodplains in Iowa and Missouri, or blizzard territory in New England? Should similar standards be applied there?

Van Ledden says many Dutch citizens may not know it, but their government has accepted—even legislated—unequal protection, or what engineers euphemistically call "differentiation." Everyone knows that all places can't be protected up to the same standard; individual cost must be balanced against collective cost, he says.

Beefy levees keep the water at bay. For now. Photo: David Wolman

The US certainly has variable protection levels throughout the country, but there's a difference between de facto disparity and an explicit government policy of inequality. Imagine if Congress or the Army Corps were to recommend protecting the French Quarter and downtown New Orleans at the 10,000-year level while giving less economically productive areas such as St. Bernard Parish only a 100-year level of protection. Applying the Dutch model of risk-based design would be a political nonstarter, if not unconstitutional, and the efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers would in no time be halted by an army of lawyers.

Meanwhile, the water keeps coming. The Dutch are taking on the threat of global warming before anyone's feet are wet. They're showing the world that to prepare for sea-level rise and other impacts of climate change, you need, paradoxically, not dominion-over-nature bravado but patience, good data, and—above all—the long view.

Contributing editor David Wolman (david@david-wolman.com) wrote about Egyptian activists using Facebook in issue 16.11.

The world's smallest snake, a prehistoric ant and microbes that may be 120,000 years old: These are just a few of the species revealed to the world in the last 12 months.

With animals going extinct at rates unseen since the dinosaurs disappeared, it's nice to be reminded that some species haven't even been discovered.

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How to
Climate-Proof a Country

Learn By Doing and Save $300

How to Climate-Proof a Country

How to
Climate-Proof a Country