"I shot one guy in the head, and his head exploded."

"You don't think about it."

"I went ahead and engaged him ... and I saw a little blood come out of his chest. It was a good hit."

In "Agrippa (a Book of the Dead)," a collaboration between William Gibson, the science-fiction writer, and Dennis Ashbaugh, an artist, the poem has been encoded in the letters C, A, T and G; they represent the first letters of the quartet of nucleic acids in DNA: cytosine, adenine, thymine and guanine.

Among Mr. Ashbaugh's prints are two photosensitive images that either appear or disappear when exposed to the light. The poem itself, on a floppy disk, becomes encrypted as soon as it has been downloaded and can never be accessed again. The book has never been fully opened. But there it sits among its admittedly tamer cousins in one of the Edna Barnes Salomon Room's august tilted, glass-fronted cases, enigmatically doing its part to answer the exhibition's prevailing question.

Can books, without even being read, say something?

It takes at least two episodes for Larry David's television persona to regain some degree of cozy familiarity. And that discomfort is one of the things that make "Curb Your Enthusiasm" so unusual and so funny.

Percentage of Baghdad’s citizens asked to participate in a Gallup poll last September who agreed to do so: 98

In one of his first interviews to date, the director of HSARPA shared his priorities and plans, many of which focus on quickly developing a suite of next-generation sensor networks to help detect and respond to biological, chemical or nuclear attacks.

One of HSARPA's top priorities is developing a class of sensor networks ... a call netted some 518 white papers, now under evaluation.

It's watching you.

With the introduction of the EyeToy, the PS2 now has the ability to track body motions and recognize free-space gestures as part of interacting with a whole new class of entertainment software.

"The Pursuit of Happiness" is the theme for the 2004 program of the annual "TED" conference. (TED is "Technology. Entertainment. Design.") The conference will be held February 25-28, 2004 at the Monterey Conference Center.

The speaker program contains, among many others, Steven Strogatz, Virginia Postrel, Malcolm Gladwell, Stewart Brand, Antonio Damasio, Steve Case, Eve Ensler, Mark Cuban, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Craig Venter.

Arms brokers and spies built a clandestine network to acquire rusting Soviet Bloc engine parts to illegally extend missiles' range.

... Haitham Sabbagh, owner of STC, a heating and air-conditioning firm in Damascus, denied that his firm ever dealt with Iraqis or with Polish suppliers, even after paperwork related to the Polish deal and bearing his letterhead were presented to him.