We love reading about the future that never was almost as much as the one that's coming. Why? Because you get to try and conceptualize gems like this: a "huge rolling cross-country pleasure ball" that's nuclear powered and features a hotel-like interior that remains upright thanks to some gyro-stabilization. Hey, why not!

When we dig uranium out of the ground, 99% of it is U-238, which we don't care about. 1% of it is U-235, which we use for all kinds of things, including conventional reactor fuel. Bill Gates and some of his pals figure that it would be a much better idea if we could just burn the U-238 instead.

The word "meltdown" defines our worst fears about nuclear reactors, and with good reason: without complex and redundant cooling systems, reactors can run out of control, generating so much heat that they melt their own fuel, releasing massive amounts of radioactivity in the process. But a new generation of reactors promises to be much safer, even to the point where a meltdown is a physical impossibility.

The computer worm called "Stuxnet" was discovered back in June, but it's full capabilities are only now being discovered. At first, we thought it just spied on the workings of industrial systems. We now know we were dead, dead wrong.