In the spirit of finding extremely efficient human powered or assisted vehicles we mention the go-one. It has a surprising amount of carbon fiber for the price (6500 euros or $6500 in the US at the San Jose dealership). It looks fairly weatherproof for mild climates and may be just the ticket if you have low traffic density on your road. A nearly 1 hp electric assist motor is mentioned with a lightweight Li battery. You could charge this up with a small solar panel and a battery to have real off-grid/off oil transportation.
On the down side it is quite heavy if you intend to be the powerplant.
http://www.go-one.de/
Someone has gone to the effort of putting together an animated technical dictionary. It lacks the detail of many sources, but may be just the ticket for folks who are interested in a highlevel view of what they are using.
http://crosstouch.com/techtionary/index_in.html
When it comes to discovery the two Voyager missions set the standard to which everything else is held. The science section of the NY Times did a nice review piece recently... Voyager 1 is nearly a light day out at this point!
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/science/space/13VOYA.html
It is interesting to think about the feedback between technology and science. I doubt that Microsoft has made any impact on science (other than monetary gifts to universities and research projects), but the invention of the Web was important. New detector technologies in astronomy and particle physics were critical and led to what amounts to a revolution in the past two decades.
Finally we note moon trees. I thought that I knew quite a bit about the moon program, but this was new to me.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/13aug_moontrees.htm?list55634
5:30:52 AM 
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