By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 29, 2005; C01

Stinky is one ugly robot, a raggedy contraption constructed of crudely painted, cheap plastic pipes pasted together with gobs of the foul-smelling glue that gave the monstrosity its name.

Stinky's creators didn't look all that impressive, either -- four teenage guys in baggy pants and sneakers, all of them illegal Mexican immigrants attending Carl Hayden High School in funky West Phoenix.

When Stinky arrived at last year's Marine Advanced Technology Remotely Operated Vehicle Competition -- an underwater robotics contest sponsored by NASA and the Office of Naval Research -- it was greeted with barely suppressed snickers. Nobody expected Stinky to compete with the robot from MIT, a handsome machine created by 12 elite engineering and computer science students and decorated with a sticker from ExxonMobil, the company that donated $5,000 to the MIT team.

But the kids from Hayden High beat MIT and the rest of the competition -- an amazing upset chronicled in an inspiring story in the April issue of Wired magazine. Americans love a tale of scrappy underdogs triumphing against long odds, and "La Vida Robot" by Joshua Davis is a classic. It's got all the ingredients of a feel-good movie of the week -- colorful characters, high drama, low comedy and a happy ending.

Well, a sort of happy ending.

It began when a couple of Hayden science teachers put up fliers offering to coach a team in the contest, which requires the construction of a remote-controlled robot that can explore a sunken mock-up of a submarine.

Four kids signed up: Cristian Arcega, the school's science whiz, who lived in a wooden shack attached to his parents' trailer. Lorenzo Santillan, a former gang member who loves fixing cars. Oscar Vazquez, an ROTC student with leadership skills. And Luis Aranda, a big, burly kid with the muscle to wrestle the 100-pound robot into place.

They raised $800 from local businesses and built Stinky out of PVC pipes and off-the-shelf computer parts. They tested it in a local pool, then headed to Santa Barbara last summer for the contest.

"The Carl Hayden teammates tried to hide their nervousness, but they were intimidated," Davis writes. "Lorenzo had never seen so many white people in one place."

Immediately, they had a problem: When Aranda lowered Stinky into the pool, they realized they had a leak. Not only did they have to re-solder every wire in the machine overnight, Vazquez told his teammates, but they also had to find something absorbent to keep moisture away from the circuitry.

"Absorbent?" Santillan asked, recalling countless TV ads. "Like a tampon?"

Soon, Santillan was in the nearest supermarket, trying to work up the courage to ask a young woman for advice on which brand of tampons might work best in an underwater robot.

The woman laughed and made her recommendation. "I hope you win," she said.

And win they did, copping the grand prize after Stinky performed a task the MIT robot couldn't -- sucking fluid from a tiny container 12 feet under water. They also won the awards for best design and best technical writing.

"Us illiterate people from the desert?" Santillan said he thought when they won, amazed that a bunch of "English as a Second Language" kids had just beaten America's most prestigious engineering school.

Their moment of triumph was sweet but short-lived.

Vazquez and Aranda graduated from Hayden last spring, but they're not in college now, Davis writes, because they're illegal immigrants and thus ineligible for student loans or cheap in-state tuition. Vazquez is hanging drywall and Aranda is filing papers at a Social Security office. Santillan and Arcega are still at Hayden, Davis says, but their prospects for college also look dubious.

Is there anybody out there who can give these kids a break?

In its latest cover story, Weatherwise, the 58-year-old Washington-based meteorology magazine, asks a question that's on a lot of people's minds these days:

"Is the weather getting worse?"

And the answer, boiled down from interviews with various scientists, is: Yes.

"There is an increasingly clear message: At least some of the aspects of the world's climate are in fact becoming more extreme, and global warming is the likely cause," writes David Laskin.

What that means is that weather is going to get more exciting. More heat waves, most of them occurring in places that are already very hot. More rain, much of it coming in very heavy rainstorms. Also more cyclones. And perhaps more hurricanes and tornadoes. In short: more intense and extreme weather.

"There is an ominous tone to scientists' pronouncements about the future that one did not hear a few years ago," Laskin writes. Then he quotes David Karoly, a professor at the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology, sounding ominous indeed:

"We are entering a state which earth's climate has not seen for a very, very long period, at least 20,000 years. For the entire span of civilization, the earth has never experienced these temperatures."

This scary article did have one bit of good news, however. Remember "The Day After Tomorrow," the 2004 disaster movie that showed New York and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere being destroyed in a few days by a barrage of hellish storms? The scientists are pretty sure that's not going to happen. And if it does, it'll probably take more than a few days.

Salvador Dali was one of the great surrealist painters of the 20th century, the guy who painted soft watches dripping from trees and tabletops. But, as an article in the April Smithsonian points out, Dali was also a master of another great modern art form: the publicity stunt.

"To promote 'The World of Salvador Dali,' a book he produced with French photographer Robert Descharnes in 1962, Dali dressed in a golden robe and lay on a bed in a Manhattan bookstore," writes Stanley Meisler. "Attended by a doctor, a nurse and [his wife] Gala, he signed books while wired to a machine that recorded his brain waves and blood pressure. A copy of the data was presented to the purchaser."

Wow! The PR biz lost a great one when old Salli Dali decided to go into the art game.

The Hayden High team triumphantly hoists Stinky. The glow of victory has since faded.