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So instead it sits on the desk, where we alternately admire the images (a gallery of which we've pulled together here for your enjoyment); marvel at the collected facts (some fungi use microscopic lassos to rope in worms to eat!); and titter at species names like Drumstick Truffle-Club, Mousepee Pinkgill, and The Sickener.

For each species, the book gives an interesting description, including geographical distribution, habitat, edibility, on a scale from edible to unpleasant to poisonous, and other relevant facts. "In the past," we learn, the Woolly Milkcap "was said to have been commonly roasted and added to coffee in Norway, though it is not clear why."

ShelvAR consists of an Android app and a set of coded tags, representing call numbers, that are placed on books' spines. When a librarian holds a smartphone or tablet camera up to a shelf, the app reads all the tags at once, thanks to a new algorithm that can decipher multiple patterns even though they're small when viewed at a distance. Then the app uses a simple sorting method—at least for computers, which aren't fazed by complex letter-digit combos like Q164 .G72 2009--to figure out the correct order and the shortest number of moves needed to achieve it. The phone's screen displays red X's over any misfiled books, along with arrows that show where they really belong.

The prototype app, built by computer science professor Bo Brinkman and research assistant Matt Hodges, has successfully analyzed a dozen books with half-inch tags. The team is now working on scaling up to 75 to 150 quarter-inch-thin books, so that they can scan a full shelf in one shot, and in December, they'll test the app in part of the university library. Adding ShelvAR tags could save libraries time and money in the long run, since workers now do frequent shelf checks by hand.

If all goes well, a beta version of ShelvAR will be released next spring. Librarians are already envisioning other uses for the technology, Brinkmann tells us, such as displaying a star rating over recommended books or helping lost students find the book they're looking for.

ShelvAR consists of an Android app and a set of coded tags, representing call numbers, that are placed on books' spines. When a librarian holds a smartphone or tablet camera up to a shelf, the app reads all the tags at once, thanks to a new algorithm that can decipher multiple patterns even though they're small when viewed at a distance. Then the app uses a simple sorting method—at least for computers, which aren't fazed by complex letter-digit combos like Q164 .G72 2009--to figure out the correct order and the shortest number of moves needed to achieve it. The phone's screen displays red X's over any misfiled books, along with arrows that show where they really belong.

The prototype app, built by computer science professor Bo Brinkman and research assistant Matt Hodges, has successfully analyzed a dozen books with half-inch tags. The team is now working on scaling up to 75 to 150 quarter-inch-thin books, so that they can scan a full shelf in one shot, and in December, they'll test the app in part of the university library. Adding ShelvAR tags could save libraries time and money in the long run, since workers now do frequent shelf checks by hand.

If all goes well, a beta version of ShelvAR will be released next spring. Librarians are already envisioning other uses for the technology, Brinkmann tells us, such as displaying a star rating over recommended books or helping lost students find the book they're looking for.

In a high-tech kitchen laboratory in Seattle, Nathan Myhrvold is putting the finishing touches on Modernist Cuisine, his obsessive 2,438-page cookbook documenting the future of food. I recently visited for a futuristic breakfast

I was eating with Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, in the rather amazing kitchen at the heart of his 20,000-square-foot laboratory outside Seattle.

Around us stood shelves of hydrocolloids and emulsifiers, freeze-drying and spray-drying apparatus, a battery of immersion circulators, homogenizers, vacuum chambers, and even less readily identifiable laboratory equipment that Myhrvold and his team have shanghaied for culinary purposes. "I never want to work again in a kitchen without a centrifuge," Maxime Bilet, the kitchen's head chef of R&D, tells me.

Click to launch the photo gallery for a tour of Myhrvold's wondrous kitchen laboratory, and a closer look at my meal

This kitchen is the home base of Modernist Cuisine, a rather ambitious cookbook project that Myhrvold first outlined in 2006. He holds PhDs in mathematical economics and theoretical physics, studied with Stephen Hawking, and worked for years as CTO of Microsoft (which left him with a healthy amount of spare change). But cooking, and particularly the research end of cooking, has always been a strong interest. He studied at the esteemed cooking school La Varenne, apprenticed at top Seattle restaurant Rover's one day a week while he was still at Microsoft; and won first-place titles at the World Championship of Barbecue in 1991.

As he became interested in sous-vide cooking -- the modern method of cooking vacuum-sealed foods at low temperatures for hours or days on end -- he saw the need for a book codifying the increasingly popular technique. But, with perhaps fewer constraints on him than many of us have, he saw the book blossom into what it has now become: six volumes covering a much broader domain of technologically enhanced cookery, totalling 2,438 13-by-10-inch pages, self-published and sold in an acrylic case for $625. Last year, when it was projected at a mere 1.5 kilopages, it had already garnered blurbs from top names in food like "The most important book in the culinary arts since Escoffier" (Tim Zagat) and "The cookbook to end all cookbooks" (David Chang).

"We're the only combination cookbook studio, research kitchen, and general laboratory that I'm aware of," says Myhrvold as we unfold our napkins. In addition to the kitchen where we sit, the building, which belongs to Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures, houses a working biology lab and mosquito hatchery, a chemistry lab, a serious machine shop, a "small things lab," and a photography studio (where the beautiful book was produced), as well as a number of areas demarcated by blue masking tape on the floor, about which I am sworn to secrecy.

Intellectual Ventures, Myhrvold's "day job," is in the business of patents, buying them from inventors as well as developing its own, which is what the lab's for. One of the main areas of innovation is fighting mosquito-borne disease; the last time PopSci covered the company, it was for the laser weapon designed to blast mosquitoes out of the sky. A humid insectary room just off the kitchen contains dozens of breeding compartments, each home to a different strain of mosquito. (There's very little cross-contamination, I'm repeatedly assured.)

Myhrvold has always taken an analytical approach to food. As a barbecue pitmaster, he encountered the common phenomenon known as "barbecue stall": when cooking a piece of meat, the internal temperature doesn't rise consistently, as one might expect; instead, it rises for a while, then holds steady for a few hours before continuing to rise. As Myhrvold explains, theories about what causes the stall have varied widely -- was all that heat energy being used by the endothermic reaction turning the beef's collagen into gelatin, for instance?

He designed a simple experiment to answer the burning question. He cut a brisket in half, sealing one portion in an airtight pouch, and leaving the other naked. Both were cooked in a precise convection oven. The naked brisket stalled as usual, remaining around 172 degrees F for two and a half hours; but the sealed brisket's temperature rose evenly, with no stall. Factors like collagen conversion and fat melting were the same in both portions, so those reactions couldn't have been what was stalling the meat. His hypothesis -- that the stall is caused by surface evaporation of water -- was established. "And this is kind of the definitive experiment!" Myhrvold exclaims.

"In this lab, we did invent some new dishes and found some new things out, but primarily we're documenting the revolution that's already occurred: the modernist revolution that started in the late '80s, with Ferran Adria and a variety of others."

As we talk -- and consume course after course that the laboratory staff assembles for us -- Myhrvold enthusiastically shows me slides of hundreds of pages from the enormous cookbook. It begins modestly with a complete history of cooking since Paleolithic times and a grounding in the necessary basics of microbiology and physics -- Myhrvold wrote thousands of lines of code in Mathematica to model heat transfer in different substances -- before getting into the new stuff. There's a volume dedicated just to Ingredients, with detailed coverage of meat and vegetables as well as chapters on gels, emulsions, and foams. The section called "The Modernist Kitchen" covers topics like Extracting Flavors and Cryogenic Freezing; sous vide has its own chapter. When the book presents recipes, they're often in stripped-down parametric form, presenting the essentials of temperature and time in chart form to allow experienced cooks to quickly look up how to apply a particular technique.

It's a lovely-looking book, too. The paper and the printing process have received no less scrutiny than the cooking. In addition to his other accomplishments, Myhrvold is an award-winning photographer -- the ravening lion that illustrates the Meat chapter was photographed by him in Botswana. One of the first people hired to work on the project, back in 2007, was photographer Ryan Matthew Smith, whose vivid shots give the book its distinctive look. A recurring motif is the cutaway, a cross-section view of what exactly is happening in a piece of meat, hot wok, or microwave during cooking. Although it looks like photographic trickery, in most cases this effect was won the hard way: cutting a piece of equipment in half in the laboratory's machine shop (they even bisected a $5,000 oven), then photographing it in action, as hot oil or whatnot spattered out the missing side -- most often, it seems, onto the game Max Bilet.

After a round of foie-gras bonbons, two different preparations of sous-vide beef, and a plate of homemade processed cheese -- same idea as Velveeta, but rather better -- the meal comes to an end with a scoop of lush pistachio gelato. Unlike gelati I've known and loved, which are creamy because they're made with abundant amounts of cream and egg yolks, this one is dairy-free. The creamy texture is the product of pushing pistachios through an ultra-high-pressure homogenizer, so their oil emulsifies into a fine-textured, opaque cream -- much as milk does -- that provides the body for the dessert.

Modernist Cuisine is not a cookbook for everybody; it demands not only a deep wallet but also a capacious kitchen to accommodate at least a modicum of the fun equipment the book covers. (Tune in soon for my home-centrifuging experiments.) And to accommodate the book itself, which comes in just under 50 pounds. But an influential portion of the culinary world has been breathlessly anticipating the publication, now on target for March, and it seems certain that the book's effect will resonate beyond those of us who intend to read it cover to cover and fiercely bid on eBay for ultrasonic baths. Myhrvold is confident that his book will leave a mark.

"I'm hoping, for the rest of my damn life, I go to restaurants, look at the menu, and I say, 'aha, I know where that came from!'"

Also see our close look at what's inside the kitchen lab.

The technology blows away the competition by scanning 200 pages a minute

The scanner's camera runs at 500 frames per second, and captures rapidly flipping book pages in two modes. First, a regular line shines on the page to capture text and images. The second mode then manages neat the trick of reconstructing the curved, distorted pages in their original form. A laser device projects lines onto each page that the system can use to recreate the 3-D page model and correct the deformed lines.

Google's own proprietary book-scanning technology seems to use some sort of infrared camera to capture the 3-D shape of book pages, but the book lies flat and the page-turning mechanism is unclear. Other book scanners boast of capturing about 50 pages per minute, which is four times slower than the new method.

Masatoshi Ishikawa -- the University of Tokyo researcher behind the book-scanning marvel -- previously developed the fastest robot hands in the East, so he's probably not too worried about tiring out human hands by flipping book pages.

Miniaturized versions of this technology could eventually find their way into our smartphones for completely legal digitizing delights. Or it might combine with the robot hands to bring Short Circuit's Johnny 5 to life.

[via IEEE Spectrum]