two inventors in California have developed a voice mail system that detects the degree of anger of the caller. This system is meant to direct impatient or furious callers to customer service representatives specially trained to handle annoyed customers.

a computer known as "Deep Blue" (developed by a team of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University) beat World Grand Champion Gary Kasparov at Chess on May 11, 1997, an accomplishment many, including Mr. Kasparov, said would never happen. All previous attempts by a computer, including Deep Blue's predecessor "Deep Thought", to beat a chess master at that level had failed.

in the search for the tiniest computer circuitry possible, researchers at Lucent Technologies have built a transistor in which the layer that switches currents on and off is only one molecule thick.

the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a tiny country (smaller than Rhode Island) in Europe, has the highest per capita income in the world, currently more than $48,000.

a new game called geocaching involves hiding a box of small, unique items (called the "cache") somewhere in the woods, a park, a beach, or other public place and then posting the cache's coordinates on a Web site. Enthusiasts then try to find the cache using a GPS (Global Positioning System) device, which leads them to within 30 feet of the cache's location. If you find the cache, you can take any one of the items but must replace it with something else. This geocaching game is increasingly popular, with more than 18,000 caches presently out in 122 countries.

an industrial design student in England has created a toaster built with a microprocessor connected via telephone to a Web server that imprints the surface of the toasting bread with a picture of that day's weather forecast: a sun, a could, or raindrops. Cereal eaters will presumably have to wait for the next generation of machine before being meteorologically correct.

most drugs come from plants; for instance, aspirin is an ancient remedy originally found in willow bark.

the biggest company in the world, in terms of market value, is Microsoft at $300 billion.

a new computer keyboard called Prodikeys comes attached with a 37-key piano keyboard that simulates the sound of different musical instruments, presumably enabling you to jam with your coworkers when the mood strikes.

the World Wide Web was started in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN physics laboratory in Switzerland. The original goal was to develop a system for researchers around the world to share and exchange ideas.

the true father of the recoding industry is not Thomas Edison, but less well known Emile Berliner, who invented the microphone, the flat recording disk, and the gramophone player.