(FORTUNE Magazine) – HEAT-BEATING CHOCOLATE It's summer, and chocolate not only melts in your mouth, it also melts all over your shirt, hands, and children. Last year Hershey came up with a chocolate bar for the soldiers in the Middle East, and now the very confection that survived the war is in your local grocery store. The Desert Bar can withstand temperatures of up to 140 degrees, and even then it only turns fudgy (conventional bars start to liquefy at 78 degrees). FORTUNE's taste testers said they wouldn't confuse it with Lindt's, but it's as appetizing as Hershey's regular recipe -- especially when it's good and warm, with the fudgier texture you can get by nuking it in the microwave.

MOOD CLOTHING If your kids are complaining that they don't get nearly enough attention, try Generra Sportswear's Hypercolor. This Seattle company has produced apparel that, like the celebrated ''mood rings'' of the 1970s, changes color in reaction to body or atmospheric heat. The dyeing system was developed by Japan's Matsui Shikiso chemical company -- which won't disclose the technology involved -- and Generra is applying it to cotton-knit T-shirts, sweatshirts, and shorts. Walk into a hot room, blow on the garment, or touch it, and it changes shade -- or even becomes another color. Blue turns pink; green turns yellow; purple turns blue. Body hot spots like armpits and neckline turn first, so don't try Hypercolor if you embarrass easily. It's available in major department stores: T-shirts start at $24; shorts, $33; sweatshirts, $45.

COLORFUL FAXES It's the world's first full-color desktop facsimile machine, and it's a beauty. From Sharp Electronics, the FO-9000 can send the most detailed color photos and documents in minutes with near-perfect reproduction. The process works in three steps and costs roughly $3 per copy. First, the user tells the machine the size of the photo being transmitted, and the FO-9000 scans it onto its hard disk. The fax then sends the data through phone lines to its $ counterpart in another office, and the second fax re-creates the image by printing a layer each of yellow, cyan, and magenta from a thermosensitive ribbon. The FO-9000 can share a line with a conventional fax machine and bypass black and white calls to handle only color ones. The machine won't disappear among books on a desk, though; it measures about 16 inches high by 18 wide by 17 deep and weighs a crushing 88 pounds. The price is heavy as well, $31,995 -- or more accurately, $63,990 a pair, since what use is only one? The Sharp FO-9000 is available from authorized dealers.

CHEAPER TALK Reach out and touch a colleague across the country -- for peanuts. With this network server from Micom Communications Corp. of Simi Valley, California, you can put voice and fax traffic on low-cost, low-bandwidth leased lines that normally transport data. Only big companies can afford the $100,000-per-year leases from phone companies for the high-bandwidth lines that can also carry voice. Smaller enterprises that lease low-bandwidth lines to transmit data from, say, their New York office to their Los Angeles outpost pay regular toll charges on AT&T or MCI for phone and fax contact. Micom's server, the Marathon 5K, can use these data lines, typically about $11,000 per year, for voice and fax too. And toll calls to points off your lines are billed from the nearest location on your network -- if you call Bangor, Maine, from L.A., you pay only from New York. Each location requires one server, priced at about $3,000.