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Music Swapping Sites Challenge Entertainment Industry; Kenyan Zoo Involved in Elephant Translocation Project; Hubble Gets A Makover

Aired March 02, 2002 - 13:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANNOUNCER: NEXT@CNN. In the year since the court order that drove Napster offline, other Internet music swapping sites have popped up and movies and TV shows have entered the file-sharing picture. What's the entertainment industry to do?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILARY ROSEN, CEO, RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA: Many people say we brought this problem on ourselves.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Are these downloaders freeloading, or are they heralding the next big thing in personal entertainment?

We'll take you on a hunt for big game, but the prey won't end up like this. It's all part of the largest elephant translocation project in history. How do you move 300 tons of pachyderms? Very carefully.

And the Hubble telescope, which brought us wondrous shots of space is getting a makeover.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's an incredibly challenging mission, and yet one with an incredible reward.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Now, Hubble will be even more powerful. What marvels will it discover in the future? All that and more on NEXT.

HATTORI: Hi everybody, and welcome to NEXT@CNN. I'm James Hattori. This week, we're at the University of California at Berkeley, where in the 1960s, anti-war protests and sit-ins defined a generation of young people.

Today here and at other schools spreading from the dorms and student apartments into the mainstream, a different kind of a revolution in personal entertainment. We're talking about the sharing of digital computer files, containing music, movies, even TV shows. One year ago, a federal judge issued an order that shut down the popular Napster music-swapping website for copyright infringement, but the music didn't die and as Anne Kellen reports, neither did the file swapping.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANN KELLAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Go to any college campus and you'll find a lot of downloading going on, music, old TV shows, even movies like "Star Wars," "Return of the Jedi." The Internet is competing and threatening traditional outlets, like radio, recording studios and movie theaters.

The threat is aimed at the bottom line. For the first time since the 1980s, the record industry made less, a half billion dollars less, in 2001 than it did the previous year. Most of its losses blamed on what the industry calls "online pirates and CD burning." And now thanks for faster Internet connections, the movie industry is starting to get a taste of online theft.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: "The Mask of Zorro," "American Pie."

KELLAN: It's easy to find off the Internet? Is that so wrong? Some downloading is legal, a lot is not.

ROSEN: Parents who would never let their teenagers walk into a store and steal a pair of sneakers, say nothing when they're upstairs for hours downloading music online.

KELLAN: Some rationalize that before the Internet, limited radio play let the record industry rip us off for years.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Before this technology was out, a lot of times people would buy a CD for just one song and the rest of it would be horrible. This gives the people the ability to listen to the rest of the album, and to see if they really do like the music before they go out and buy the album.

KELLAN: Others claim it's not hurting, but helping the music industry.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's actually expanded my music collection, because now I buy so many more albums because I hear so many more bands.

ROSEN: They're not buying more. They're buying less, and we know that because we have the numbers.

KELLAN: But, critics say the recording industry has been too heavy handed, going after the services like Napster and Kazaa, instead of going after the individuals stealing copyrighted material.

Rock group Metallica, for example, joined the chorus, testifying against Napster, ultimately killing Napsters free file-sharing service. Analysts worry that targeting a company, when its product is misused, stifles innovation. FRED VON LOHMANN, E ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION: The answer is not suing the technology companies out of existence. If that were the answer, if that becomes the answer, we would not have seen the photocopier. We would not have seen radio broadcasting. We wouldn't have seen analog cassettes. Each one of these are technologies that the copyright industry has attempted to stop in their infancy, because of fears of what users and customers would do with them.

KELLAN: And we've seen this dynamic before. Remember the VCR? At first, the movie industry hated it.

VON LOHMANN: They now make more money from the sale of pre- recorded videotapes than they do from the box office.

KELLAN: The record industry is still a long way from making money off the Internet, and admits it was slow to recognize its potential.

ROSEN: Many people say we brought this problem on ourselves because our music wasn't technologically protected. Now we have to take those steps.

KELLAN: Steps like special CDs that block users from downloading the music onto their computers. Singer Charlie Pride, for example, released a protected CD. It earned him a lawsuit that has since been settled. Disgruntled consumers claim that protected CDs are inferior, and make it difficult to make copies for even personal use.

And some of those who make CD players and discs don't like it. Phillips, for example, will not incorporate blocking mechanisms into its discs. Let's face it, we're used to making personal copies of CDs or TV shows, which may be allowed under what's called the fair use doctrine. Would these blocking devices put an end to that?

MARK RASCH, PREDICTIVE SERVICES ATTORNEY: That's one of the issues, whether you can prohibit certain kinds of locks on the DVDs because that inhibits fair use.

KELLAN (on camera): Traditional players like record labels and radio stations are finally appreciating the music online scene, setting up online subscription services, like Music Net, Press Play, and Full Audio. For a monthly fee, you can download a certain number of songs every month, appealing to those with less time and less Internet savvy perhaps.

CHRIS GLADWIN, CEO, FULL AUDIO: When quality of the experience is more important than getting stuff cheap and free, that's really where services like this make sense.

KELLAN (voice over): But there's something about free.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm not going to tell you. I mean that's just stupid.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'd rather go out and buy the CD, than pay for it on the Internet, first of all because it's better quality if you just go out and buy it on the CD.

KELLAN: Moviemakers hope to avoid the chaos that unfolded in the music industry. If technology and bandwidth allow, companies like Columbia Tristar hope you'll be able to legally download a movie like "Swordfish" off the Internet within a year.

BENJAMIN FEINGOLD, PRESIDENT COLUMBIA TRISTAR MOTION PICTURE GROUP: If there's consumer demand on the Internet for films to be downloaded, we want to meet that demand at the beginning.

KELLAN: In the meantime, they're loading up their DVDs with extra features and scenes, to entice people to choose to buy the discs rather than waste time downloading poor quality movies off the Internet. These teens will tell you downloading is here to stay.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's not going to go away.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, that's what I'm saying. They should adapt to it. They're not going to just say, "OK don't download" and people will say "OK, we won't download."

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's adapt or die, basically how it works.

KELLAN: But if piracy continues, some say we all stand to lose with less music and...

RASCH: We won't have new movies unless somebody is going to make money off of creating them.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HATTORI: If you want to talk about making money, let's talk videogames. They're the fastest growing part of the entertainment industry, bringing in close to $10 billion last year in the U.S. alone.

The best of the videogaming industry was honored in Las Vegas this week. Marsha Walton has the winners of the Fifth Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MARSHA WALTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): It's all about the action in the world of videogames. Computer game of the year winner is "Black & White." Acting through characters like apes or tigers, players can choose to be kind, or evil. The game action unfolds according to that choice.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Cookie is my good character and then Psycho when I'm feeling kind of mean and nasty.

WALTON: Taking two top honors at the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Las Vegas bash, "Halo" winning top overall game of the year and console game of the year. JOHN HOWARD, LEAD DESIGNER HALO: We just tried to make a game that we thought was really fun, that really entertained us for the years we were working on it, and you know, if you think you can do that, then hopefully you can have everyone else, enjoy the game for 40, 50, 60 hours, 100 hours.

WALTON: Shoot-'em-up story lines still are a powerful presence in the game world, but after five years of these awards, new more benign themes are beginning to emerge.

Sid Meier's "Civilization 3" lets players decide how a human race survives and thrives.

SID MEIER, CEO: It's really a game about building as opposed to destroying things. It lets you get to be a king or an emperor, you know. It lets you fulfill that fantasy.

WALTON: While moviemakers have to entertain their audiences for just an hour or two, game developers must get players hooked on their storylines.

SHIGERU MIYAMOTO, NINTENDO (through translator): People always have to think of new ideas and come up with new styles of game play to keep things going.

WALTON: So games are moving beyond just guy stuff. Academy Hall of Fame inductee Will Wright says the SMS works because players already know about families, relationships, communities.

WILL WRIGHT, CREATOR SMS: They don't have to know about the military or purple dragons or magic to begin to play them.

WALTON: Awards like the Grammys may still have the glitz and glamour, but this jeans and tee shirt crowd keeps millions entertained and hungry for more.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HATTORI: For a link to the complete list of award winners, check out our website, cnn.com/next.

ANNOUNCER: Coming up on NEXT AT CNN, what does a $5 billion research budget buy? James goes face-to-face with Bill Gates, with an exclusive piece behind the cubicles at Microsoft.

Also ahead, some cool dunes may become your next national park, that and more when NEXT AT CNN returns.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HATTORI: Oil exploration near a spectacular national park in Utah has been shut down, at least temporarily. Arches National Park was in the news last month when runners carrying the Olympic Torch passed through. A few miles away, a British company has been searching for oil, using 26-ton trucks that pound the earth to find hidden oil deposits. Last weekend, the Interior Department said the project could cause irreparable harm to the desert environment, and called a halt so scientists can study the impact.

Next door in Colorado, what could be a brand new national park is taking shape. It's a unique ecosystem that seems to have dodged an environment bullet. Natalie Pawelski has the story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NATALIE PAWELSKI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Welcome to what may soon become the United States' newest national park.

GALE NORTON, INTERIOR SECRETARY: The peaks in this area are gorgeous, 14,000-foot peaks. The sand dunes are unique. There are beautiful cottonwood bottomland areas. I've seen elk wandering out on those areas. It's a wonderful and unique place.

PAWELSKI: The dunes of Great Dunes National Monument, the tallest in North America, were threatened a few years back by a plan to sell water from the giant aquifer under Baca Ranch, a vast property right next door.

The dunes may look dry, but they're actually damp a few inches down, and need the aquifer's water to stay standing. Also threatened were Colorado's biggest wetlands, a key rest stop for migratory birds. Local farmers who rely on the aquifer for irrigation, weren't happy either. Enter the Nature Conservancy.

STEVE McCORMICK, THE NATURE CONSERVANCY: We're going to be acquiring this 100,000 acre natural gem, and eventually transferring it over to the National Park Service.

NORTON: It gives us the opportunity to go through the appropriations process and to acquire the land. They have stepped in to take the land in the interim. It's a great cooperative arrangement.

PAWELSKI: Plans call for the ranch to be added to the Great Dunes National Monument, and for the combined property, a complete ecosystem to be protected as the nations' 58th national park.

PAWELSKI (on camera): Adding to the acreage owned by the federal government, it's not usually a popular cause in the West. But in this case, the Congressional delegation of Colorado stands behind the plan. Congress has already appropriated $10 million for the new national park. It needs to find another $21 million for the deal to go through.

PAWELSKI (voice over): If all goes according to plan, the Great Sand Dunes National Park will open its gates sometime in the year 2005.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HATTORI: A national park in Kenya welcomed 51 new elephants recently. The animals were relocated from a private reserve where they were causing problems. Gary Strieker reports on what it takes to move a herd of elephants 100 miles, and why it was worth the trouble. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARY STRIEKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): For wildlife authorities in Kenya, this is usually a routine operation, rounding up elephants by helicopter, darting them with drugs, loading them into crates, and trucking them far away.

But this operation in July was not routine. It was the largest elephant translocation in history, in three weeks moving 51 elephants more than 150 kilometers, nearly 100 miles out of an overcrowded private game reserve that does not want them, in to a vast national park that does.

Like other farmers around Sweetwater's Game Reserve, this woman is happy the elephants were moved. She says they often broke through the fence surrounding the reserve, destroying crops and attacking people.

Only a few years ago, this was Kenya's response to this kind of trouble, identify the offending animal and shoot it, a lethal reaction that did not solve underlying problems.

PATRICK OHUNDI, KENYA WILDLIFE SERVICE: And this was being done at random, and we lost so many elephants in that way.

STRIEKER: The real problem in Sweetwater was overpopulation in the reserve, an electric fence confining herds of elephants that had grown to 140 animals that were destroying their habitat and threatening survival of other wildlife, including rare black rhinos.

OHUNDI: We had too many elephants.

STRIEKER: Managers here say moving so many elephants out of the reserve has reduced the pressure, and by taking out nine aggressive bulls, they stopped the fence breakouts and the conflicts with surrounding farmers.

JAMES KOSKEI, SWEETWATER GAME RESERVE: So it seems the problem has been solved. Maybe we'll forget human conflict with elephants maybe for another 20, 30 years.

STRIEKER: This translocation also addressed another problem. By moving these families of elephants to Mero (ph) National Park, where depleted elephant herds are still struggling to recover from the poaching slaughter of the 1980s.

(on camera): After five years of experience with translocation of elephants in Kenya, wildlife authorities here say they're not satisfied it's not only the most humane way to deal with problem animals, it's also the most effective.

(voice over): Translocation requires specialized equipment and it's expensive, costing more than $2,000 to move each elephant in this operation, financed by several international conservation groups. But with more equipment and efficiency, this is likely to become standard practice in Kenya, shifting elephants away from problem areas into more suitable habitats.

There are now about 30,000 elephants in Kenya, and authorities say there's still enough room here in the right areas, for twice that number, almost as many elephants as were here 30 years ago.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Coming up on NEXT, the man who gave voice to our mail and put switchboard operators and secretaries out on the street.

And later, a CDA that thinks it's a cell phone or vice versa.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HATTORI: Universities like Berkeley are, of course, where major companies hire the best and brightest minds. The biggest software company in the world, Microsoft, even has research centers near campuses to tap into the brain pool, part of its $5 billion a year research program.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently gave us a rare behind- the-scenes glimpse into how some of that research ends up in your computer.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HATTORI (voice over): A triple-wide computer display that eliminates desktop paperwork.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So this would fit into standard Microsoft Office.

HATTORI: A computer that recognizes who's in the room during a meeting.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This system is called an ICU.

HATTORI: And realtime interactive graphics on a personal computer that rival Hollywood's high tech best, just three of some 130 research projects on display at Microsoft's Tech Fest. Think of it as a high tech science fair, presided over by company co-founder Bill Gates. You must be like a proud father almost.

BILL GATES, CHAIRMAN MICROSOFT: Oh, it's fun to see this stuff, particularly things I've never heard of before. And research, I think, is the lifeblood of innovation in the economy.

But big companies always have a problem taking their research and making sure it's focused on the problems that count.

HATTORI: That's why Tech Fest isn't for the public. It's for other Microsoft employees and various product groups. The researcher's goal is to get their work out in the marketplace.

RICK BASHID, MICROSOFT RESEARCH: Great new ideas, new technology that are really going to drive new products in the future, that are really going to make computing more relevant for people and solve more problems in their lives.

HATTORI: The projects are developed at research centers in Beijing, China, Cambridge, England, Northern California, and Redmond, Washington, the cost one-half billion dollars a year, one-tenth the total research budget, with no guarantee that anything will ever pan out.

GATES: The pure researchers don't have schedules. They get told "work on this area, see what you come up with."

HATTORI: Gates says Microsoft has a 50 percent success rate turning pure research into products, which he admits is unusually high.

GATES: Well, if I think something's going to catch on, I trust my own intuition.

HATTORI: And you're never wrong.

GATES: No, I'm often wrong but my batting record is good enough that, you know, I keep swinging every time the ball is thrown.

BASHID: When you're building products that are literally going to be used by 300 or 400 million people around the world in many different countries, in many different languages, it is an enormous undertaking.

HATTORI: Among the successes, technologies developed for the Windows Media Player, the grammar check feature in Microsoft word processors, and high resolution graphics used in the company's new X- Box video game consoles.

Similar work just finished by the Beijing lab could make snazzy new media graphics like this, even more commonplace.

YA-QIN ZHANG, MICROSOFT RESEARCH CHINA: This is photo-realism, interactivity, ability to manipulate, to retrieve. You can navigate through the picture, you know, in a very natural and straightforward manner.

HATTORI: The ICU recognition project could end up in a future version of the Windows operating system.

GATES: So you can see as you walk in here, the computer is identifying that that's your face, and now it's recording various images.

HATTORI: Does it know you? That's the question. Like all the projects here, aiming to put a more user-friendly face on computing. There it is. Well, it looks like you guys get paid this week.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HATTORI: Some day, a few of those Microsoft inventions may be as common as voice mail, some day. Speaking of voice mail, the man who invented it, Gordon Matthews, has die at age 65, after complications from a stroke. Bruce Morton has some thoughts on how Matthews has changed our lives for better or worse.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRUCE MORTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Gordon Matthews, he invented voice mail and changed America.

No more telephone operators. No more switchboards. No more coming back to a desk full of message slips that your secretary left for you. What's a secretary?

JOEL ACHENBACK, WASHINGTON POST: I don't think secretaries exist anymore. In fact, I don't even think we can use the word secretary anymore. I think that it's understood now that technology runs our lives.

MORTON: That's the trouble. This man is calling the passport information office. Yeah, right.

ACHENBACK: You find yourself screaming into the phone, saying "no I don't want any of those six options. I want the option 7 that you're not giving to me."

MORTON (on camera): And a recording always thanks us for our patience. I don't have a lot of patience, and when I hear that, I'm always tempted to give the phone a good whack. You can say that's silly or telephone abuse or whatever, and if you want to argue about it call me. I'm right here, 202-898-7547, but don't expect to get a real person. I've got voice mail just like everybody else.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HATTORI: I've got voice mail too, but please if you want to get a hold of us at NEXT, e-mail is the way to go. Our address is, next@cnn.com. We'll be back after a break and the latest headlines from the newsroom.

ANNOUNCER: Still ahead, daring into space, the Hubble space telescope improves its vision. And a story of penguin love that has endured even though this couple will never produce the pitter-patter of little penguin feet. NEXT will be back in a few minutes. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HATTORI: Welcome back to NEXT@CNN. Astronomers here at U.C. Berkeley have joined the search for intelligent life in the universe. Using a 40-inch telescope at the Lick (ph) Observatory, they're scanning the skies looking for brief pulses of artificial light, which may have been sent by aliens, tens, even hundreds of light years away.

Meantime, another tool to search the heavens, the Hubble space telescope, is about to get an upgrade. The Space Shuttle Columbia took off from a chilly Kennedy Space Center early Friday, carrying seven astronauts on a service call to the orbiting telescope. Miles O'Brien reports on the Hubble's checkered past and promising future.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): You're looking at Hubble Mission Control. Astronomers here have born witness to a 24 x 7 stream of cosmological revelation for about a decade now. Amazing, isn't it? Launched with a flawed mirror and myopic vision, at first Hubble didn't just rhyme with trouble, it embodied it in epic proportions.

Astronomer Ed Weiler was there for it all, including the day in December of '93, when the first 20-20 image appeared on the screens.

ED WEILER, ASTRONOMER, NASA SCIENCE ADMINISTRATOR: We knew we had redemption from going from a national joke that the nighttime hosts were, you know, using us to we did it. We fixed it, and then the rest is history. We went from a national disgrace in some people's minds to a symbol of the great American comeback.

O'BRIEN: Hubble came back to prove black holes existed and found them all over the place. It found hints of solar systems like our own, and it showed us how the universe looked 10 billion years ago, when galaxies were toddlers.

WEILER: If Hubble is seeing the seven or six-year-old kids, the new camera will get us back maybe to the three or two-year-olds.

O'BRIEN: That new camera, the main reason for this trip, will be 10 times stronger than the one it replaces. Seven astronauts, the fourth crew to service Hubble, will be there for a week ticking off a long to-do list of telescope improvements during five arduous space walks.

SCOTT ALTMAN, SHUTTLE COMMANDER: It's an incredibly challenging mission, and yet one with an incredible reward, as we look at Hubble and extending its reach.

O'BRIEN (on camera): Not to mention its depth. Every Hubble image ever beamed back to earth is here in this room. It used to be they were stored on disks this size in machines, which filled up the room. Today, the disks are a lot smaller, as you might suspect, and so are the machines. But don't let the size fool you. Inside here is seven and a half terabytes of Hubble data. To put that in some perspective, the entire Library of Congress consists of 10 terabytes.

MARK POSTMAN, HUBBLE DATA PROCESSING CHIEF: The sum total of all the data we have is pretty impressive.

O'BRIEN (voice over): A decade ago, this was a problem astronomers dreamed of having, so today they consider themselves lucky to be conjuring up new ways to drink from the fire hose of data that Hubble and a few dozen big earthbound telescopes churn out each day, the concept, a virtual observatory, essentially a colossal Internet Google search of all the data in all the world's observatories.

POSTMAN: It brings research down to earth. It gives every researcher the chance to access this wealth of data, regardless of whether they're at a very data rich site or not. And so, in some sense, it makes the, it democratizes access to this large resource that we have.

O'BRIEN: But wait, there's more. Hubble's successor, the so- called Next Generation telescope, will orbit much farther from earth, and use infrared cameras to capture the universe at the beginning. That's eight years away, but don't count Hubble out even then.

WEILER: Because Hubble is so powerful, there's a lot of science buried in those observations.

O'BRIEN: Even when Hubble is gone, it most certainly will not be forgotten.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HATTORI: Hawaii's Kilauea volcano once again has some scientists worried. It's not the potential for an eruption that's making them nervous. It's the fact that a large chunk of the mountain recently shifted toward the ocean. In just 36 hours last year, the section of mountainside slid more than three inches. It was detected by a global positioning system satellite.

The concern is that if a chunk of Kilauea suddenly slid into the water, it might trigger a tidal wave that could cause devastation as far away as California, Chile or Australia. But a University of California geophysicist, writing in the Journal of Nature, says the risk of such a tidal wave occurring is extremely small.

ANNOUNCER: Still to come, some of the next big things in household appliances. Who says all an oven can do is cook? That and more coming up, stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HATTORI: One of the fun things about this job is I get to try out new high tech toys, I mean business tools. Some are well designed and useful. Others make you wonder what was the company thinking. In this week's techno file, a device to keep you organized, in touch, and on the web, all in one handy package.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HATTORI (voice over): As its name implies, the Handspring trio is three devices in one. Open it up and it kind of looks like a Palm Pilot, no surprise there since the Palm's original designers started Handspring, and both companies use the same software.

Now in addition to the familiar touch screen to control various programs, the trio has a tiny keyboard built in, borrowing from a successful Blackberry e-mail pagers. But wait, there's more. Yes, Dilbert she's dialing her trio. It's got a cellular phone, GSM compatible, built right in.

And Brian, have you heard the trio can dial up the Internet? Granted, it's not a full web browsing experience, mostly news headlines, weather and entertainment listings, but you can send and receive short messages to compatible phones and get e-mail from Yahoo or other so-called top three mail accounts.

About time you say that PDAs, personal digital assistants, evolved into multi-function devices. Handspring thinks so.

DONNA DUBINSKY, CEO HANDSPRING: Our mission always from the start was to make them into much more than organizers, to build them into communicating devices as well. It's not just a new product. It's going to be a whole new category of devices.

HATTORI: The trio is a nice effort. The plastic flip top is kind of flimsy and there's a bunch of special functions controlled by the tiny keys that you need to master, but given the alternative, carrying a PDA and a pager and a phone, I'll take a trio. That's techno file.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HATTORI: PDAs help keep your life in order, but what about your household? Rene Sanmiguel has some gadgets that might help from the recent National Association of Homebuilders Convention in Atlanta.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RENAY SAN MIGUEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Politicians can promise a chicken in every pot.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going to cook the chicken in the Avantium (ph) oven. It's going to take us about three minutes.

SAN MIGUEL: Only technology could cook it in record time. A microwave oven on steroids, that cooks eight times faster than other conventional ovens. It's the latest example of how new technologies are working their way into your home, and not just your computer room. More and more household appliances, power tools, even the houses themselves are sporting microprocessors, memory, and magic provided by their manufacturers.

TOM KREUTLER, HOST, THE MONEY PIT: I think it is they're looking at the market, they're looking at what consumers are demanding from them. They're demanding comfort. They're demanding convenience. They're demanding energy efficiency and using all this technology to try to deliver that to the consumer.

SAN MIGUEL: Whirlpool is trying to deliver that convenience in two ways. This home dry cleaning unit could make you throw away those laundry tickets. Integration is at work in Whirlpool's Polara (ph), a combination refrigerator and range. It reduces the time from defrost to dinner.

Are you ready to download your dinner with a wired refrigerator? LG Electronics of South Korea makes Internet-enabled kitchen appliances. You can point and click on new recipes, e-mail them to friends, even have nutritional information on what's in your fridge truly at your fingertips.

DANIEL LEE, LG ELECTRONICS: For example, if you wanted a nutritional value on a specific food item and look at how many calories, for example, a Coca Cola may have.

SAN MIGUEL: The humble washer and dryer are getting a high tech spin these days, courtesy of Kenmore. Gone are the square white boxes, replaced by rounded edges, darker colors, and a frontloading design. The latest technologies help conserve energy and water. The washer uses only about 42 gallons of water, compared to 60 in your average washer. The spin cycle breaks appliance land speed records at 72 miles per hour. Will all this new technology mean your repairman will need a degree in computer science?

KREUTLER: The real question to the consumer is going to be, are these fixable? Is there going to be breakdown? Is there going to be maintenance associated with this? And what's the cost to cure on that? If they get those numbers down and they become reasonable, I think we're going to see a lot of interesting things in the future from that technology.

SAN MIGUEL: It's also interesting to see certain home related companies diversify their offerings with an eye to providing 21st century creature comforts.

SAN MIGUEL (on camera): Now, this is my idea of technology in the home, the state-of-the-art home entertainment center. But this center will be put together for you by Owens Corning, that's right the insulation people. Apparently 60 years of putting fiberglass inside people's attics has made Owens Corning something of an expert in the art of acoustics.

(voice over): All these new technologies usually mean one thing, a higher price tag.

KREUTLER: These products come out and they're very expensive. They're very high end. As they become better developed, they get the technology down. The prices come down. They become more affordable.

SAN MIGUEL: And that will be the day when cost conscious but technology loving homeowners can have their chicken and eat it too.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Looks good, right?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Coming up, a home where the buffalo roams, not as carefree as you might think. Find out what's threatening the bison, when NEXT continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HATTORI: An update now on the environmental saga of Herculaneum, Missouri. As we reported a few weeks ago, the small town is grappling with the legacy of a smelter that belched out lead for more than a century. This week, state officials released a disturbing report. More than a quarter of the children living near the smelter have high levels of lead in their blood. One public health official says it's the highest rate he's seen anywhere. The new findings will help the EPA decide whether clean-up efforts by the company that ran the smelter are going far enough.

Canada has one of the most abundant supplies of anthrax in the world. It's not the same form of the deadly bacteria terrorists put in letters. This more common anthrax can be found in the soil across North America, and it's more of a danger to bison than postal workers. Mark Stevenson from Canada's CTV Network has the story.

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MARK STEVENSON, CTV NETWORK CORRESPONDENT: You have to drive deep into the isolated park with the head warden to find evidence of anthrax.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You have to be cautious when you're driving here.

STEVENSON: Even then, only tracks of an animal frequently infected with the deadly bacteria are found.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Probably a few days old. It looks like a small bull, maybe a large cow.

STEVENSON: The bison are moving further into the interior for winter. Anthrax spores are endemic in the soil here. The bison inhale the spores when foraging for food. There's been eight anthrax outbreaks here since the '60s. In this year alone, the disease claimed 93 bison.

JOSIE WENINGER, FARM SUPERINTENDENT: Anthrax is certainly a threat to the bison in the sense that it takes out large numbers when we have a large outbreak.

STEVENSON (on camera): Wild anthrax is concentrated here in Wood Buffalo National Park. Over the years, thousands of bison have died from the deadly bacteria, bacteria that can live in the soil for decades, even through extreme winters.

(voice over): In rare cases, the disease is transmitted to other wild animals, and occasionally outbreaks kill cattle.

BOB McNABB, CANADIAN CATTLEMEN'S ASSOCIATION: The cattle producers who I represent just need to be vigilant and aware that this thing is out in the environment.

STEVENSON: Outside the park, biologists have burned bison remains to stop it from spreading. Humans rarely get it from animals. The risk comes with eating large amounts of contaminated meat, or through direct contact with infected remains. Even though the bison here seem prone to infection, anthrax is just another disease threatening the animals. Tuberculosis and bovine brucilosis (ph) are already taking their toll on the world-class major free roaming herd. Some scientists are recommending drastic measures, slaughter the herd and start over.

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ANNOUNCER: Still ahead on NEXT@CNN, romance between guys in tuxedos. Stay with us.

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HATTORI: Dinosaur researchers spent all their time digging up bones, right? Well, apparently a few get out to see the movies too. Remember those scenes in "Jurassic Park" showing a T-Rex keeping up with a Jeep? It couldn't have happened, at least that's what some Stamford University researchers say, in the latest issue of the Journal of Nature.

They say the Tyrannosaurus Rex apparently couldn't run very fast if at all. They created a computer model and it shows that in order for T-Rex to run 45 miles per hour, as much as 86 percent of its weight would have to be leg muscle, and the dino files say that wouldn't leave room for all the other body parts.

And finally, this item from the wacky world of nature, in the animal kingdom, some species are known for being monogamous, penguins for example. But as Jeannie Moos tells us, those love stories are not always black and white.

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JEANNIE MOOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Helen and Ann may have split up, but Wendell and Cass are still going strong. They're gay penguins.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Gay penguins.

MOOS: No, really. You can't tell them apart from the 30 other straight penguins at the New York Aquarium in Coney Island.

STEPHANIE MITCHELL, ANIMAL KEEPER: This is Wendell right here that I'm feeding.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Gay penguins?

MOOS: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How do you know they're gay?

MITCHELL: I mean, it's a same sex couple, you know, and we have actually observed them copulating or at least attempting to copulate, so.

MOOS: Wendell and Cass have lived together in the same burrow for seven years, longer than most marriages these days.

MITCHELL: They're one of our greatest couples. I mean they're so dedicated.

MOOS: They (UNINTELLIGIBLE) each other. When they're apart, they vocalize to one another, just like male-female couples do. We're all used to seeing heterosexual animal couples from apes to emus with their elaborate courtship dances. But this is a photo of two male apes kissing. Homosexuality involving everything from giraffes to walruses is documented in a scholarly book on the subject entitled, "Biological Exuberance." The author even includes a formula used for estimating the number of lesbian seagulls. There's a whole chapter on penguins. Those are gay penguins.

Folks thought we were pulling their leg.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's the funniest thing I heard today. That made my day, gay penguins. OK, everybody else is doing it, why not the penguins?

MOOS: Since boy penguins don't have typical male equipment, it's not so easy to determine their sex.

MITCHELL: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Cassandra.

MOOS: Keepers assumed he was a she until blood tests and behavior confirmed Cass is a male. So they've been an out gay couple for a while. It reminds us of that episode of "South Park" where Sparky the dog is outed. Sparky runs away to Big Gay Animal Sanctuary, sort of like the New York Aquarium.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There have been observations of the dolphins copulating with each other.

MOOS: Tab and Presley are both males. When Wendell came down for the feeding, Cass stayed up in the couple's coveted penthouse burrow, to keep other penguins from moving in. The keeper brought the fish to him.

MITCHELL: You get door-to-door service today, honey. Cass means to be more, I mean, I hate to say this, but Cass is more of the guy in the family. He's more of the pursuer as far as the relationship goes.

MOOS: Talk penguin, though occasionally roles reverse. The straight penguins don't seem to care. Cass and Wendell may be on the rocks, but their relationship isn't.

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HATTORI: OK. Well, that's our time for now. Here's what's coming up next week. How do you train firefighters without burning down a building? Computer-controlled flames turn a big rig into a towering inferno. Plus, we'll demonstrate some videogame gadgets that will get more than just your thumbs moving, that and more coming up on NEXT. Until then, let us hear from you. Our e-mail address is next@cnn.com. Thanks so much for joining us this week, and thanks to our friends here at U.C. Berkeley, go Bears.

For all of us on the sci-tech beat, I'm James Hattori. See you next time.

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