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COLLEGE PARK, Md. — The power drink of the moment costs 20 times as much per ounce as Coca-Cola, comes in a tiny bottle and tastes so bad that most people hold their noses and down it in a single gulp.

Despite all that, sales of “energy shots” are soaring in the middle of a recession. The two-ounce drinks, which give people a concentrated dose of caffeine, B vitamins and amino acids, were all but unheard-of four years ago. Today they are the hottest drink category in the country, with sales expected to almost double this year from last, to about $700 million.

The shots are meant for people who want a jolt of caffeine without having to drink a big cup of coffee or one of the 16-ounce energy drinks that have become ubiquitous. They go down fast, more like medicine than a beverage. That is part of the appeal to their most devoted consumers: students cramming for exams or partying into the night, construction workers looking for a lift and drivers trying to stay awake.

Near the University of Maryland the other day, students thought nothing of paying $3 or more for a shot. That is $1.50 an ounce; at that price, a 20-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola would sell for $30.

“It helps me stay up all night when I have work to do,” said Matt Sporre, 20, a sophomore chemical engineering major who said he drank shots three or four nights a week when school was in session. “Those things are going to be the death of my generation,” he added. “Too much caffeine.”

Mr. Sporre and several others students said the shots worked well in combination with Adderall, a prescription drug for attention deficit disorder that is popular on college campuses. The Adderall helps them focus, they said, and the shot keeps them awake.

Several students said they sometimes downed an energy shot before going out drinking. Others said the shots helped them stay awake during long drives home from school. Two members of the university’s wrestling team said some of their teammates drank the shots before matches to get an energy lift.

A 7-Eleven store on Knox Road, just off the Maryland campus in College Park, has become one of the top sellers of energy shots among the 5,700 United States stores in the 7-Eleven chain. The store’s owner, Million Mekonen, said that sales spiked during finals in May, when the store sold close to 400 shots in a week.

But students are not the only users. Steve Cisko, 26, a construction worker renovating a dormitory, stopped in at the 7-Eleven and bought a shot made by AriZona Beverage for $3.99.

“I do demolition; it wears you out,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll take two at a time in the afternoon. Every guy I work with uses them.”

Sales of the shots are rising even as sales of traditional energy drinks like Red Bull have flattened out. Bill Pecoriello, chief executive of Consumer Edge Research, estimated that shot sales could reach $700 million this year, nearly double last year’s $370 million, not counting sales by Wal-Mart Stores. The estimate was based on sales data collected by Information Resources, a market research firm.

The market is dominated by a tiny company in suburban Detroit called Living Essentials, which began test sales in late 2004 of a product called 5-Hour Energy, packaged in small plastic bottles. Today, 5-Hour Energy accounts for about 80 percent of the rapidly expanding market, according to Mr. Pecoriello.

The company’s unlikely success — it has only one other product, an antihangover pill called Chaser — has forced the big beverage makers to play catch-up. Last month, Red Bull introduced a two-ounce shot, and Dr Pepper Snapple began test-marketing a three-ounce version of its Venom energy drink, called Venom Bite. Coca-Cola introduced a shot last year based on its NOS energy drink.

Many smaller companies have jumped in too, often offering products with similar names, like 6 Hour Power, Fuel 7 Hour Energy and Mr. Energy 8-Hour Energy.

Living Essentials has spent heavily on advertising to build the market and hold its position against newcomers. It expects to spend $60 million this year on television advertising for 5-Hour Energy. It has also gone after several of its competitors in court, challenging labels or product names it said were too close to its own.

The most vigorous legal battle pits Living Essentials against a Texas company called Custom Nutrition Laboratories and includes accusations of betrayal, stolen secrets and other skullduggery.

LONDON — Before jetting to Greece for a quick sailing holiday last week the British theater producer Sonia Friedman convened her staff for a meeting titled “Current and Productions in Development.” It could have been called “Enough Plays to Fill an Entire Broadway Season.”

Ms. Friedman, who has won the last two Tony Awards for best play revival (for “Boeing-Boeing” in 2008 and “The Norman Conquests” last month), is well known in the theater here and on Broadway for having a dizzying number of projects going at once, the recession be damned.

That morning’s agenda covered eight current shows — including her West End hits “La Cage aux Folles” and “Arcadia,” both possible transfers to Broadway — and 22 more in various stages. Among them: a theatrical version of the film “Shakespeare in Love,” which she is negotiating to develop with the producer Harvey Weinstein, and a production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” starring Kim Cattrall (Samantha of “Sex and the City”).

“We’re seeing the new photos for marketing ‘Prick Up Your Ears’ tomorrow, yeah?” she asked, a question that led to discussion, with the seven other women and three men in the room, about problems with e-mail spam filters that balk at the title of that play about Joe Orton.

“Should we just start writing ‘P.U.Y.E.’ instead?” Ms. Friedman said, adding to no one in particular, “How do you pronounce ‘P.U.Y.E.’ anyway?”

There was also attention to detail — arranging for flowers and Champagne for an understudy debut that night — as well as bad news to break, as she disclosed that Alan Ayckbourn’s “Norman Conquests” would not extend on Broadway as she had hoped, because of scheduling conflicts with the cast, and would not earn back its full investment. (It closes on July 26.)

If the economy has created challenges for producers everywhere, scuttling some plans and delaying others, Ms. Friedman seems to have both a sense and sensibility for taking the vagaries of show business in stride.

She laughs loud and is often self-deprecating. She appears unfazed by setbacks. (A recent, painful romantic breakup has clearly fortified her defense mechanisms.) If she often looks as if she has partied hard the night before, with her wild bed-head blond tresses and a slightly exhausted appearance, she seems, at 44, to have stamina to spare. One of the few young female producers working extensively in the West End and on Broadway, she also has a set of producing partners and investors who trust her instincts.

“Unlike a lot of producers Sonia’s not afraid to take a risk for great theater, even if it might not stack up on paper as an obvious commercial prospect,” said David Babani, artistic director of the Menier Chocolate Factory, a burgeoning theater company here that transferred “Sunday in the Park With George” to Broadway last year.

Mr. Babani cited Ms. Friedman’s Broadway productions last season of “Norman” and “The Seagull,” starring Kristin Scott Thomas, as two examples, noting that neither was a guaranteed hit; “Norman” was a slow ticket seller at first during its London run in 2008.

“People in London and in New York have come to trust her gut for quality straight plays that can build an audience in either city,” Mr. Babani said.

Ms. Friedman and Mr. Babani, who originally staged the current “La Cage” revival at the Chocolate Factory, are now hoping for a Broadway theater for “La Cage” in the spring. It is an intimate, scaled-down production, running on a relatively small stage at the Playhouse Theater here and could falter in a Broadway barn. “La Cage” was also on Broadway as recently as 2005, when it won the Tony for best musical revival, raising questions about whether New York theatergoers would have an appetite this soon for another “La Cage.”

“I think our ‘La Cage’ focuses on the human relationships in a way that Broadway audiences haven’t seen in past productions,” Ms. Friedman said. “But a transfer to Broadway needs to feel right before we do it.”

The youngest of four children in a family of performers and musicians — one of her sisters is the actress Maria Friedman (“The Woman in White” on Broadway) — Ms. Friedman said she fell in love with theater as a teenager while assisting Maria in a London production of “Oklahoma!”

“I was far more interested with what was going on backstage than in actually performing myself,” she said.

Japan’s legions of robots, the world’s largest fleet of mechanized workers, are being idled as the country suffers its deepest recession in more than a generation as consumers worldwide cut spending on cars and gadgets.

At a large Yaskawa Electric factory on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, where robots once churned out more robots, a lone robotic worker with steely arms twisted and turned, testing its motors for the day new orders return. Its immobile co-workers stood silent in rows, many with arms frozen in midair.

At the same time, the future is looking less bright. Tighter finances are injecting a dose of reality into some of Japan’s more fantastic projects — like pet robots and cyborg receptionists — that could cramp innovation long after the economy recovers.

“We’ve taken a huge hammering,” said Koji Toshima, president of Yaskawa, Japan’s largest maker of industrial robots.

Profit at the company plunged by two-thirds, to 6.9 billion yen, about $72 million, in the year ended March 20, and it predicts a loss this year.

Across the industry, shipments of industrial robots fell 33 percent in the last quarter of 2008, and 59 percent in the first quarter of 2009, according to the Japan Robot Association.

Tetsuaki Ueda, an analyst at the research firm Fuji Keizai, expects the market to shrink by as much as 40 percent this year. Investment in robots, he said, “has been the first to go as companies protect their human workers.”

While robots can be cheaper than flesh-and-blood workers over the long term, the upfront investment costs are much higher.

In 2005, more than 370,000 robots worked at factories across Japan, about 40 percent of the global total, representing 32 robots for every 1,000 manufacturing employees, according to a report by Macquarie Bank. A 2007 government plan for technology policy called for one million industrial robots to be installed by 2025. That will almost certainly not happen.

“The recession has set the robot industry back years,” Mr. Ueda said.

That goes for industrial robots and the more cuddly toy robots.

In fact, several of the lovable sort have already become casualties of the recession.

The robot maker Systec Akazawa filed for bankruptcy in January, less than a year after it introduced its miniature PLEN walking robot at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Roborior by Tmsuk — a watermelon-shape house sitter on wheels that rolls around a home and uses infrared sensors to detect suspicious movement and a video camera to transmit images to absent residents — has struggled to find new users. A rental program was scrapped in April because of lack of interest.

Though the company won’t release sale figures, it has sold less than a third of the goal, 3,000 units, it set when Roborior hit the market in 2005, analysts say. There are no plans to manufacture more.

That is a shame, Mariko Ishikawa, a Tmsuk spokesman, says, because busy Japanese in the city could use the Roborior to keep an eye on aging parents in the countryside.

“Roborior is just the kind of robot Japanese society needs in the future,” Ms. Ishikawa said.

Japan’s aging population had given the development of home robots an added imperative. With nearly 25 percent of citizens 65 or older, the country was banking on robots to replenish the work force and to help nurse the elderly.

But sales of a Secom product, My Spoon, a robot with a swiveling, spoon-fitted arm that helps older or disabled people eat, have similarly stalled as caregivers balk at its $4,000 price.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries failed to sell even one of its toddler-size home-helper robots, the Wakamaru, introduced in 2003.

Of course, less practical, novelty robots have fallen on even harder times in the downturn. And that goes for robot makers outside Japan, too.

Ugobe, based in Idaho, is the maker of the cute green Pleo dinosaur robot with a wiggly tail; it filed for bankruptcy protection in April.

Despite selling 100,000 Pleos and earning more than $20 million, the company racked up millions of dollars in debt and was unable to raise further financing.

Sony pulled the plug on its robot dog, Aibo, in 2006, seven years after its introduction. Though initially popular, Aibo, costing more than $2,000, never managed to break into the mass market.

The $300 i-Sobot from Takara Tomy, a small toy robot that can recognize spoken words, was meant to break the price barrier. The company, based in Tokyo, has sold 47,000 since the i-Sobot went on sale in late 2007, a spokeswoman, Chie Yamada, said, making it a blockbuster hit in the robot world.

But with sales faltering in the last year, the company has no plans to release further versions after it clears out its inventory of about 3,000.

Kenji Hara, an analyst at the research and marketing firm Seed Planning, says many of Japan’s robotics projects tend to be too far-fetched, concentrating on humanoids and other leaps of the imagination that cannot be readily brought to market.

“Japanese scientists grew up watching robot cartoons, so they all want to make two-legged companions,” Mr. Hara said. “But are they realistic? Do consumers really want home-helper robots?”

Robot Factory, once a mecca for robot fans in the western city of Osaka, closed in April after a plunge in sales. “In the end,” said Yoshitomo Mukai, whose store, Jungle, took over some of Robot Factory’s old stock, “robots are still expensive, and don’t really do much.”

Of course, that is not true for industrial robots — at least not when the economy is booming.

Fuji Heavy Industries argues its robots are practical and make economic sense. The company sells a giant automated cleaning robot that can use elevators to travel between floors on its own. The wheeled robot, which resembles a small street-cleaning car, already works at several skyscrapers in Tokyo.

Companies can recoup the 6 million yen investment in the cleaner robot in as quickly as three years, a Fuji spokesman, Kenta Matsumoto, said. The manufacturer has rented out about 50 so far.

“A robot will work every day and night without complaining,” Mr. Matsumoto said. “You can even save on lights and heating, because robots don’t need any of that.”

Manchester United has announced that the club will be playing several friendlies in Asia during the summer of 2009.

The projected dates for the summer tour, as of press time, are:

• Malaysia - July 18, Malaysia XI v Man United
• Indonesia - July 20, Indonesia XI v Man United
• Korea - July 24, FC Seoul v Man United
• China - July 26, Greentown FC v Man United

Manchester United will depart for Asia on July 16.

In the summer of 2008, Man United toured South Africa and Nigeria instead of Asia. The last time the Red Devils had a preseason tour in Asia was 2007. However, the 2009 summer tour marks the fifth time in the last decade that the club has toured Asia.

Not surprisingly, Man United’s 2009 summer tour is very similar to Chelsea’s 2008 summer tour where the Blues visited China, Macau and Kuala Lumpur. It’s not surprising because both clubs employed the same Asian football promoter, ProEvents.

We've just learned Michael Jackson has died. He was 50.

Michael suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this afternoon at his Holmby Hills home and paramedics were unable to revive him. We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back.

A source tells us Jackson was dead when paramedics arrived. A cardiologist at UCLA tells TMZ Jackson died of cardiac arrest.

Once at the hospital, the staff tried to resuscitate him but he was completely unresponsive.

A source inside the hospital told us there was "absolute chaos" after Jackson arrived. People who were with the singer were screaming, "You've got to save him! You've got to save him!"

We're told one of the staff members at Jackson's home called 911.

La Toya ran in the hospital sobbing after Jackson was pronounced dead.

Michael is survived by three children: Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr., Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince "Blanket" Michael Jackson II.

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