Even with the success of Twitter many people have wondered how the company would begin to make money of off all the millions of tweets users post. Most people assume that Twitter will finally cave in and begin offering advertising on their website, though it seems the company is opposed to that currently, but has [...]

Engineeer and cartoonist Tim Hunkin created an arcade game that at first appears to be an ATM or banking kiosk. When coins are inserted, the banking poster drops and reveals Wack-A-Banker, giving you an opportunity to take your aggressions out on a group of financially oppressive stereotypes.

One Smart Suit

A Japanese company, Haruyama Trading Co., has developed a suit that it claims protects the wearer from the deadly H1N1 strain of influenza.
The company has produced 50,000 of the suits and will start selling them on Thursday, according to a company spokesman.
The suit is coated with the chemical titanium dioxide, which reacts to [...]

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!!!

Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that pharmacology researchers are developing a drug that could diminish the pleasurable effects of cocaine. Taking the drug might help addicts detoxify with greater success:
The vaccine itself does not destroy cocaine molecules, rather it induces antibodies that bind to it, making the opiate lose its ability to [...]

GOOD’s executive compensation infographic shows the compensation levels of the business world’s top execs, with the number of minimum wage earners each super-suit’s take-home pay would support. Wow that is a lot of capitalistic greed!

American mega megacorp Cargill, which brought in $116.6 billion in revenue last year, is in the spotlight this week around the story of Stephanie Smith: the 22 year old children’s dance instructor was paralyzed from the waist down after eating E. coli-tainted hamburger traced back to the meat supplier.
She was in a coma for nine [...]

India is sucking 54 trillion liters of water out of the ground every year
India’s thirst for groundwater is threatening a major water crisis, and adding to global sea level rise, says a report.
Virendra Tiwari, from the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad, says that satellite measurements have shown that northern India is sucking some 54 [...]

Children who eat sweets and chocolate every day are more likely to be violent as adults, according to new research.
Children who eat sweets and chocolate every day are more likely to be violent as adults, according to new research.

A new study estimates that people with a gun are 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun.
In a first-of its-kind study, epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that, on average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in [...]

Two Romanians accused of sophisticated phishing attacks targeting major financial institutions have been extradited to the US for trial.
25 year old Petru Bogdan Belbita and 28 year old Cornel Ionut Tonita, both from Romania, were arrested in Canada and Croatia respectively.  They stand accused, along with five other defendants, of duping customers of financial institutions, [...]

Doesn’t this make you want to go for a swim?
Waterways across the upper Midwest are increasingly plagued with ugly, smelly and potentially deadly blue-green algae, bloomed by drought and fertilizer runoffs from farm fields, that’s killed dozens of dogs and sickened many people.

Each inmate costs US taxpayers more than $22,000 a year
From the death penalty to “three strikes” laws, Americans love tough responses to crime—but not necessarily smart ones. Nils Christie has a better idea: Stop treating lawbreakers like criminals.
“I don’t like the term crime—it’s such a big, fat, imprecise word,” says the renowned University of Oslo [...]

This SHOULD be a headline in major newspapers, but due to big money manipulations it has not been picked up. Many communities have enacted smoking bans in public places, some of which have been in effect for several years. How is that affecting our overall health? According to an analysis of studies, the bans are significantly [...]

Cash-strapped Europeans are travelling to Britain to go bankrupt – then returning home debt-free. “Bankruptcy tourism” is becoming so popular that a company is now helping insolvent Europeans to travel and live temporarily in the UK.
Lenient laws mean that foreigners can live in Britain, file for bankruptcy and leave with the slate wiped clean after [...]

“We’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”
7-Eleven Inc. said Thursday that its franchisees and store operators have collected 1.6 million signatures nationwide in its petition drive against what it calls unfair credit card fees.
The Dallas-based convenience store chain held the signature drive from June 22 through Aug. 10 at store counters [...]

scientists have developed a pair of glasses that receive visual data from a camera mounted on a them and send the images to a chip attatched on the side of the eyeball.

Inspired by the success of cochlear implants that can restore hearing to some deaf people, researchers at MIT are working on a retinal implant [...]

Privacy? What Privacy?

Princeton’s Paul Ohm writes about Netflix’s insane new plan to release millions of customers’ personal information — ZIP code, gender, year of birth — as a sequel to its Netflix Challenge. Latanya Sweeney’s famous study on de-anonymizing data has shown that date (not just year) of birth, gender and ZIP are sufficient to [...]

Hot money going out, even hotter coming back in
In September 2008, China witnessed a massive exodus of hot money due to the global financial crisis. However, with the Chinese economy showing signs of improvement in the second quarter of 2009, the situation reversed with a rush of hot money returning to China.
In late June 2009, [...]

For years the people in congress have ignored the outrageous
practices of banks and credit card companies
A backlash is brewing on Capitol Hill against banks that charge large fees for overdrafts without asking or telling customers, the latest sign that the financial crisis is shifting the balance of power from banks toward borrowers.
Banks struggling to survive [...]

Texting for Economic Improvement?

British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling could take a tip from his counterparts in the Philippines as he searches for money-saving ideas this weekend: a tax on text messages.
The parliament in Manila is planning to implement an excise tax on text messages in a desperate attempt to narrow the country’s budget [...]

Convenience vs Heath

Mobile phones may have become ubiquitous in rural areas of India and popular among farmers. But electromagnetic radiation emanating from them may be stunting the growth of agricultural crops and plants, preliminary research has revealed.
Studies carried out at Panjab University, Chandigarh, suggest that electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation from cell phones could choke seeds, [...]

Wine tastes different to those who are given information on the product before a wine tasting, tests where the test people received information on the wine before and after the tasting have shown.
Wine tastes different to those who are given information on the product before a wine tasting, tests where the test people received information [...]

McWhores

Product placement is to be allowed on British TV shows, in a move due to be announced this week.
Independent broadcasters will be allowed to take payments for displaying commercial products during shows.
The change is intended to bring in extra funds for commercial broadcasters.

Tough figures for this big state!

Out of a job? If you live in the Great State of California, you’re in good company: two out of five working-age Californians do not have a job!
“The current recession stands apart from prior downturns for both the depth and breadth of destruction in the job market,” the report says. [...]

The New “Sinless” Search Engine

Muslims will be able to surf the internet without the fear of accidentally encountering what their relegion views as sinful material after a Dutch company launched the world’s first Islamic search engine.
The ImHalal service works like any other search facility until potentially illicit words are entered, when it rates the search [...]