A Swiss musician sees colors when she hears music, and experiences tastes ranging from sour and bitter to low-fat cream and mown grass, astounded scientists say.

Rich Karlgaard:
Google and Wal-Mart are the business world’s version of yin and yang. Google is a hypergrowth, high-revenue, wildly high-margin company. Three thousand employees produce annual sales of $5 billion (at the current run rate), or $1.67 million per worker. Cash flow is north of $500,000 per worker per year. The typical Google […]

The US military is funding development of a weapon that delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometres away. Intended for use against rioters, it is meant to leave victims unharmed. But pain researchers are furious that work aimed at controlling pain has been used to develop a weapon. And they fear […]

More than 600,000 hysterectomies are performed every year in the United States at a cost of $5 billion, which doesn’t take into account the 144 million work hours lost to the average six-week recovery time.

U.S. researchers claim to have invented the first Internet search engine tuned to uncover scandal as it unfolds, gossip as it’s being dished, and able to monitor the prickly views of an increasingly prominent tribe of bloggers.

As the speed and range of wireless devices increases, networks that previously stretched from the study to the lounge room now cover entire cities.

In October Goggle released its desktop search engine. Since then, MSN, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo have come out with competing products. But even last summer, Blinkx had its software ready to download. It has since accumulated a million active users.

Drive-thru brothels are set to appear across Germany after the country’s first one proved a huge success.

Andre Durand:
While identity is indeed a complex and multi-faceted topic, I’ve come to appreciate one simple concept:
The right identity system will accomodate the needs of all participants.

Even though Slashdot’s traffic continues to grow, now ranging from 300,000 to 500,000 visitors a day, links on Slashdot no longer reap the overwhelming numbers of clickthroughs they used to. Chalk it up to the ever-expanding Web.

Next-generation interactive game capabilities promise to put viewers in the middle of the action — from NASCAR races to bingo and beyond