Phoenix-based neon artist is not a career for the faint of anything. In the summertime, it's more than 120 degrees in Sue Meyers' studio. She's not running the A/C and she says a swamp cooler won't cut it because during the day, she's using 1,800-degree flames to mold, craft, and twist glass tubes that she'll fit and light to create neon signs and sculptures for businesses and "vintage" art fiends around the country. Meyers says she's been fascinated by neon since she was a kid and would go with her mom on trips to Las Vegas. In the early '90s, she took a neon class, and later ditched her commercial design gig to pursue what she knows is a temperamental industry full-time. Today, she's fighting the growing popularity of LED, not to mention the dangers of molding glass and working with neon in pure form, but she'll assure you that while her process is anything but cool, her product is exactly that. See a video of Meyers' work.

There's a buzz in the science community these days. Led by Dr. Gro Amdam, a team of scientists based mostly at Arizona State University recently published its cool findings — that older bees actually can reverse brain aging when they do work normally done by their younger comrades. The team also discovered a physical change in proteins in the bees' little brains — including one protein also found in humans that can help protect against dementia. So, you ask, how does any of this relate to us two-legged types? Well, down the road, researchers might be able to create a drug that can help folks maintain brain function. Genius!

Aaron Voigt is a cat with a penchant for the past — specifically the 1950s. He occasionally styles his black hair into a pompadour worthy of Buddy Holly himself and bombs around on a vintage beach cruiser, and his workshop is adorned with tiki heads and filled with the distortion-filled strains of surf rock. Voigt's fondness for the Eisenhower era also is illustrated in the retro-futuristic look of his handmade robot creations, which resemble the snazzy Space Age automatons seen in sci-fi flicks of that period, right down to the myriad dials, gears, and colorful bulbs adorning box-like chests and heads. Many of the Mesa artist's works are rectangular in nature, owing to the fact that Voigt usually fashions each robot's body from square-shaped steel tubing. After welding the pieces together, he adds various voltmeters, springs, knobs from vintage appliances, and discarded antiques to give each 'bot its own personality. "I'm also trying to mimic the old tin toys of the 1950s," Voigt says. "So if I can find something that just looks right and mount it so it looks believable as a robot component, or it adds to the robot look, I'll use it." He often spends entire days in his workshop cranking out dozens of pieces, which has led to a cramped and cluttered situation where a few of his own creations, which can get fairly heavy, have fallen off shelves and conked him on the foot. So much for Isaac Asimov's law about robots being verboten from causing harm to humans.

First-year psych students love spouting off about that dusty old Jungian theory concerning mankind's penchant for duality. (You know, that whole thing about our supposed yin-yang nature or potential for both good and evil.) Well, they'd probably have an effin' field day analyzing some of the disparate flicks featured every year at the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival. Imaginative fables of impossible feats and futuristic stories of hope are mixed with twisted tales of bloodthirsty abominations and terrifying deeds to make up the lineup of feature-length movies and short films of 30 minutes or less that screen at the annual event, which operates in conjunction with the Phoenix Film Festival. Now in its eighth year, it dispenses both cerebral sci-fi thrills and ghastly horror film chills that send your psyche into overdrive.

As any local cinema buff can tell you, Arizona has been a popular destination for film crews since the 1930s. It's due in part to our state's abundance of harsh desert terrain, which has proved an ideal setting for hundreds of Westerns. Ditto for science fiction flicks, particularly post-apocalyptic yarns like Planet of the Apes — both the original and its execrable 2001 remake — or tales involving barren desert planets. (That doesn't include Return of the Jedi, because it was shot just across the border from Yuma in California.) Other non-desert settings in Arizona have been seen in sci-fi films, including Starman, Star Trek: First Contact, and our personal favorite, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. The zany 1989 time-travel comedy was largely lensed in the Valley, which stood in for San Dimas, California. Watching the film is a cinematic tour though such local landmarks as Golfland Sunsplash in Mesa, Metrocenter, and the Ralph Haver-designed Coronado High School in Scottsdale. (A few of the locations are sadly no longer in existence, such as Metro's iconic basement ice-skating rink, below the food court.) We still get a chuckle whenever we drive past the Circle K at Hardy Drive and Southern Avenue in Tempe — the location where Bill and Ted meet their future selves — and invoke the memorable line from the same scene: "Strange things are afoot at the Circle K."

Robert F. Kennedy once famously waxed: "Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" The optimistic sentiment, paraphrased from George Bernard Shaw, is something likely shared by the slew of speculative-fiction scribes who attend and appear at LepreCon each year. While most of the geekazoid gatherings and conventions taking place around the Valley each year include science fiction and fantasy content, such topics take a larger focus at this event, particularly literary renditions of worlds that never were. As such, the lineup of special guests at LepreCon, which has been around since 1974, has included award-winners like Elizabeth Bear and Darrell K. Sweet. Meanwhile, hundreds of panels and events are held, featuring info on getting into the sci-fi book biz, discussions about the metaphors involved with aliens, public readings, and the possibilities of getting fan fiction published. Hey, it worked for that chick who wrote 50 Shades of Grey, which started out as a piece of Twilight fanfic.

When artist David Therrien first purchased this 9,000-square-foot warehouse south of downtown Phoenix in 1999, it was in disarray. Formerly the home of Arizona Testing Labs — which examined and analyzed crime evidence for the Phoenix Police Department, as well as water and soil samples — the building contained broken equipment, trash, and a few homeless folks. "Back then, the old St. Vincent DePaul was across the street, so when I got the building, there were people and their stuff everywhere," Therrien says. "It wouldn't be fair to describe them as squatters, since squatters tend to fix up a place a little. It took me a few months to get things to where I wanted." Eventually, Therrien transformed his own personal laboratory, conducting all sorts of artistic experiments and helping incubate culture. Initially dubbed ChemLab (and currently known as OP-Tic), it became legendary for hosting intimate photography shows and ginormous installation pieces, as well as sound-generating equipment and quirky technology-based events in which man battled machines. One of the more recent artistic experiments happened in February, when Therrien featured a stunning exhibition of large-scale paintings by Yuko Yabuki, a bizarre butoh performance by CoCo Katsura, and noise art from Noncommunication. And the results of this latest arts experiment? Stunning, to say the least.

It was pitched to the world as one of the grandest scientific ventures of all time, but ultimately wound up being nothing more than a titanic joke mired in scandal. In 1991, the much-ballyhooed biological experiment known as Biosphere 2 was launched outside Tucson, sealing eight people inside a $200 million self-contained, glass-enclosed airtight habitat that essentially was a 7.2-million-cubic-foot terrarium stocked with flora and fauna. It was hoped they could grow their own food, maintain the environment, and live in harmony. Too bad it was a disappointment on nearly every level. Animals started dying off, the air became unbreathable because of an overabundance of carbon dioxide, infighting developed, and everyone became malnourished. By the time they were released two years later, the organization that built and ran the place was revealed as a New Age cult and its so-called scientific findings were deemed bunkum. In the two decades since, Biosphere 2 was bought by Columbia University and later sold to the U of A (its current owner), both of which gave it a modicum of respectability as a biological and climate-research facility. Basically, it's an ant farm on steroids that's become an interesting footnote in Arizona history.

Security is phenomenally tight at both of the sprawling high-tech facilities owned by Orbital Sciences Corporation in the East Valley. It's so tight that even Tom Cruise in full-on Mission: Impossible mode couldn't penetrate either of its buildings. Given the sort of top-secret stuff being designed and built inside, such security is to be expected. As the company's name portends, the technicians and engineers of Orbital Sciences create rockets, missiles, and other flame-spewing space projectiles for NASA and the Department of Defense, as well as a number of satellites. Inside the clean rooms at the Launch Systems Group building in Chandler, workers assemble the Taurus XL and rockets from the Minotaur series, both of which are used to launch satellites beyond the atmosphere. Over in Gilbert, OSC's Space Systems Group assembles orbiting devices that do everything from analyze the polar ice caps to facilitate worldwide communications. Per the Orbital Sciences' website, the company's currently hiring but requires an extensive background check. Better make sure you take care of those traffic tickets.

It's hard not to feel awestruck when gazing up at the 103-foot Titan II missile that's housed underground at this submerged former nuclear silo in southern Arizona. Truth be told, had things gone differentially during the Cold War, neither we nor the rocket (nor many like it) would be around right now. Thankfully, World War III never happened and the silo never got to fulfill its intended purpose. Instead, it became a tourist attraction after being decommissioned by the U.S. government in 1982. It's the only museum of its kind in the nation, as each of the 32 other Titan II launch facilities around America has been destroyed, sold to private interests, or turned into condos. Visitors can descend more than 140 feet to explore the adjacent command bunker, where a simulated launch sequence is run during tours and one can get an up-close view of the inert weapon of mass destruction.