Do you work for a fat cat who pays himself millions even when company profits are down? If the answer is “yes”, your low morale could be directly related to the boss’s unjustified greed. According to a survey this week, fat cat bosses send workers’ morale plummeting.
Three years of boardroom pay hikes, against the [...]

Education can help to make the Web safer, but the day may be coming when ISPs simply deny surfing rights to inadequately protected customers
Hollywood could not have made up a more menacing sequel. Let’s call it Blaster Worm II: Attack of SoBig. Hot on the heels of the Blaster Worm scare, another nasty virus [...]

Yeast could have a use in the manufacture of medicines, as well as in brewing beer and baking bread, after scientists genetically engineered a yeast culture to make it able to secrete human proteins.
The breakthrough could allow yeast to be turned into a “medicine factory”, churning out therapeutic proteins for the treatment of diseases [...]

The youngest children in a school year group have a higher risk of developing mental health problems than the oldest children, according to a new study.
A survey of more than 10,000 British schoolchildren aged five to 15 years old, found that those with birthdays in the last three months of the school year were more [...]

the stereotype of video gaming as the domain of teenage boys, an industry group reported on Tuesday that more adult women than young boys are playing games. Not only that, but the average age of players has risen to 29.
A poll released by the Entertainment Software Association and conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates [...]

If you visit the Disneyland Resort this week, keep your eyes peeled for the new creation from Imagineering: Lucky the Audio-Animatronic dinosaur is loose in Disney’s California Adventure.
During this two-week trial, Lucky and his pal Chandler the Dinosaur Handler can be found roaming the Hollywood Backlot District, making a loop from Hollywood and Dine, [...]

You have until Monday to vent your spleen or display your expletive skills for posterity.
So far, more than 500 callers have dialed “Swearline” to record their diatribes in answer to a year-long appeal by Lucky Pierre, a five-artist Chicago collective.
A selection of the recordings will end up on compact discs and put in a jukebox, [...]

The unique part about open source is that it creates its own economies, only without any money changing hands. This works well when people are supported by other companies with extra time on their hands and motivated by the projects they’re working to complete.
But what if an alternative currency were designed specifically for the [...]

The hundreds of thousands of subway passengers trapped for hours on the New York City subways during the largest North American blackout earlier this month take note: one day subways could run independent of the electricity grid.
The Denver-based Fuelcell Propulsion Institute plans to convert a 120-ton diesel locomotive into a fuel cell-driven train, a project [...]

While top telecommunications executives talked at an annual free-market conference about delivering Wi-Fi without a business model, Wi-Fi entrepreneur Jim Selby and his Aspen Wireless crew were outside the room selling Wi-Fi cards to conference goers.
Those with Wi-Fi had Internet access from within the bunkerlike conference room while BlackBerries were silenced.

The Wi-Fi train has reached the station. Commuters in and out of Silicon Valley will be the first in the United States to experience wireless Internet access while riding the rails.
A three-month trial will begin in September for riders of Altamont Commuter Express, or ACE Rail. It’s free during the trial; fees for later [...]

Bad memories could become a thing of the past as new research has solved a problem that hindered advances in targeted memory deletion.
The research, by a team of scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel could lead to more effective treatments for a host of psychological traumas.
Research into memory erasure has yielded [...]

Tiny self-assembling silicon chips that orient and sense their local environment could be used to detect disease, bioterrorism and pollution.
Michael Sailor, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, and Jamie Link, a graduate student in his laboratory, designed and synthesized the tiny silicon chips.
The chips consist of two colored [...]

It’s the latest controversy to hit pop music, and it doesn’t have anything to do with sex or drugs or trashed hotel rooms.
Instead, the music industry is divided over the use of computer hardware called autotuners, used by acts such as Britney Spears and ”N Sync to make sweeter music on the days when [...]

US firm Space Adventures is potentially interested in buying a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to make tourist flights to the International Space Station (ISS), ITAR-TASS quoted the company’s chief as saying.
The Arlington, Virgina-based firm, which brokered the first two tourist space flights in 2001 and 2002, has signed a contract with the Russian space agency [...]

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
- Albert Einstein

Glued to a computer screen in his north Tokyo apartment, the stocky, part-time sushi delivery man spent weeks searching the recesses of the Internet. Going simply by the handle “Murata,” the 28-year-old surfed for online companions harboring his same dark interest: the desire to die.
He found what he was looking for on a host [...]

Chapter 2 of the Great Dot-Com Bust of 2000 has begun, the part in which former employees of Internet start-ups try to re-acclimate to the corporate world. While they were gone, they tasted what it was like to introduce products without multilayered approvals, to set their own hours, to party hard as well as work [...]

Enforcing tighter standards and introducing a healthy dose of digital smarts will minimize the risk of future blackouts
For a commodity we take for granted, electricity is remarkably challenging to deliver. The national grid that sends electrons to our computers and toasters is, in essence, one huge electrical circuit. The laws of physics dictate that [...]

Toyota plans to release a car next month in Japan that parallel parks itself, an Australian newspaper reported.
Toyota has rigged its hybrid Prius model with special gear to accomplish the feat. It uses a rear-mounted camera and a computer program to perform the task, consistently making a perfect reverse park without the driver touching [...]

The people that are developing open-source software are contributing a great deal to society. Complimentary currencies may hold the key to providing a method to reward those who contribute.
The open source movement has made serious inroads into changing the way business is being conducted throughout the world. In addition to its obvious advantages of being [...]

Researchers have known for years that cutting calories can prolong life in everything from yeast cells to mammals. But an easier way to live longer may be as simple as turning a corkscrew.
Molecules found in red wine, peanuts and other products of the plant world have for the first time been shown to mimic the [...]

The universe will look quite different to astronomers after the launch on Monday of NASA’s latest satellite observatory, built to see objects either too cold to cast their own light or obscured by interstellar dust.
From failed stars that never turned on, to the galaxy’s own dust-shrouded heart, the Space Infra Red Telescope Facility will look [...]

Injecting magnetic nanoparticles into the bloodstream could reveal the precise location of viruses, with early trials pinpointing viruses in body fluids and tissue samples and human trials just a few years away.
The injected nanoparticles are coated with antibodies to a particular virus so that they form clumps wherever the virus is present.
The clumps [...]

SPRAY-ON computers the size of a grain of sand are set to transform information technology across the world thanks to pioneering research at Edinburgh University.
Scientists at the institution have just been awarded a £1.3 million grant to develop the “ubiquitous computing” technology which uses tiny semiconductor specks that can sense, compute and communicate without [...]