Workaholic Monkeys, Search Engine IPO's and More...

Slashdot and others are reporting that researchers have discovered a way to make slacker monkeys into veritable workaholics. By blocking a dopamine receptor in the brain, the scientists speculate that the monkeys could not formulate a risk/reward balance that would prevent them from doing tasks at the last moment. Yes, but can they type out Shakespeare any faster?

In news that outweighs everything else today, Google is going public with an initial price of $85 a share.

Slashdot is chock full of good stuff this week, in another report, engineers at Onomy Labs have designed a computer console based on a retro-futuristic Philco Predicta TV set from 1958. Way cool!

In news with potentially disasterous consequences, the US has cancelled its nuclear fusion research program. Since fusion provides clean and potentially limitless cheap power, it boggles the mind why we aren't going full speed ahead in perfecting this technology. It would certainly solve many problems in the middle east.

In news with less disasterous , but nonetheless serious consequences, MSNBC has an interesting story about the potential for athletes to engage in "gene doping" using gene therapies to produce performance enhancements that would be al but undetectable. Interesting premise with the backdrop of the Olympic Games in Athens.

In other disasterous consequence news, the average time to infect an unprotected network computer on a broadband connection has dropped to twenty minutes. Ouch!
- posted by Base10 @ 10:55 AM