Inventing the future is a difficult business, which is why the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- the owner of this publication -- can be a rather serious place. MIT students are even serious about goofing off: consider the planning that goes into the clever hacks perpetrated upon the Great Dome, the campus's architectural centerpiece. In past years students have redecorated the 46-meter-high dome as R2-D2 and topped it with a police cruiser.

In that spirit of serious play, we present what we've taken to calling the "summer of fun" issue. We haven't, of course, abandoned our focus on emerging technologies. You'll find plenty new to chew on: a new algorithm from IBM that could make search engines more intelligent (see "Smarter Search"); genetically engineered fluorescent E. coli bacteria that can signal environmental changes (see "Bacterial Sensors"); even an animatronic squirrel that uses social cues to manage your telephone calls (see "Executive Squirrel"). But in this issue, we've mainly chosen to draw out the social and personal meanings of novel technologies.