In a twist of trading virtual gold or Linden Dollars for virtual cybersex, in Korea some underage girls are trading real-world sexual services in exchange for virtual items for use in a MMORPG.

Created as an answer to the perennial problem of getting the right people with the right expertise together to collaborate on a project, IdeaConnection is a website that allows you to post a problem you need solving and then pick from a screened roster of experts to assign the job (and the funds) to. It will also be “a place where people buy and sell ideas, inventions, and intellectual property.” It’s a great idea, but the success of most social networking platforms is due (at least in part) to them being free to use … perhaps I should float a project to start an ad-supported version.

One of the best things about robots is they never get sick – but they can be programmed to pretend that they are sick, like the android patient that a Japanese team have developed to provide realistic simulations of ailments for med students to diagnose.

Further medical robotics news comes in the form of a delightful story about a two centimeter long device designed for swimmming around in a patient’s gastrointestinal tract to diagnose and treat ailments. I feel better already!

Here’s a way of generating wind-power without building those (allegedly) ugly windmills all over the place – a skyscraper whose floors are rotated independently around a central shaft by the wind, construction of which is due to start in Dubai before the end of the year. Words really can’t do the idea justice, you’ll have to click through for the pictures and animations … while you’re there, you can check out the skepticism of the commenters, who have a good point – wouldn’t you end up being pushed toward the outer edges by centrifugal force?

Jet-lag is no fun, as anyone who has experienced it is sure to tell you. But if you were staying on Mars for any length of time, the slightly longer than 24-hour days would make you feel like you had an unshakeable case of jet-lag – which wouldn’t be conducive to working efficiently, to say the least. Hence NASA’s recent experiments, which have discovered that brief exposures to bright light in the evening can help the Circadian rhythms of the body adjust to longer days. They hypothesise that this may be a useful treatment for insomnia and other sleep disorders, too, but I doubt it’ll offer much help to the crazy guy trying to break the world record for sleep deprivation.