The opportunities for making a (real world) living out of (virtual) jobs in the alternate reality world ‘Second Life’ are allowing canny entrepreneurs to give up their day jobs and shift their careers completely out of meatspace. [Wired.com]

While it’s pretty groovy that these scientists are turning viruses into medicinal delivery systems, it makes me cringe to think that they have to make the virus more difficult for the human immune to destroy to do it. Muddy religious overtones aside, haven’t these people ever read The Stand?

Andy Cox has kindly started up a message board for me over at the TTA Press website. I’m hoping this will be a place people can visit to discuss Futurismic, among other things. Stop by!

Italian astronomers using the prosaically named ‘Very Large Telescope’ have discovered that every time the globular cluster Messier-12 has passed through the Milky Way it has had thousands of its less-massive stars stolen. [EurekAlert!]

IBM announces a new method of working with silicon that boosts performance considerably. The boys at Big Blue have been compressing the semiconductor, which fundamentally changes certain properties of the material and allows faster operation. Moore’s Law has some life in it yet. [Wired.com]