Piercing of any kind is not for me. Watching my wife put in earrings makes me squeamish. But for those of you who have no such aversions, here’s a set of do-it-yourself instructions for implanting an RFID chip in your hand.

The Grey Lady takes exception to the White House’s plan to sell National Forest land to fund rural schools and reduce the deficit. Whatever you may think of this particular plan, it’s hard to argue with the editorial’s opening line: “It’s rarely a good idea to sell off assets to pay normal operating expenses.”

Antibiotic-resistance in bacteria is becoming more common at the same time that new antibiotics are becoming scarcer. Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia have discovered compounds called furanones that prevent certain kinds of bacteria from switching on disease-causing mechanisms. The most exciting thing about this discovery is that the furanones don’t kill the bacteria, and so don’t exert the same kind of evolutionary pressure to develop resistance to the compounds.

Steven Johnson proposes that the current balkanized world of MMORPG’s will soon converge into the long-awaited metaverse, and points to the convergence of operating systems and email standards as past evidence.

ZDNet is running the first of three parts of an article discussing Artificial Intelligence. Part 1 focuses on the historical origins of machine intelligence and neural networks.