Tech stories and other interesting tidbits

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From ABC News - Technology

Video Game Addiction: A New Diagnosis? - Is Video Game Addiction a Psychiatric Disorder? AMA Report Seeks to Declare It One

Fringe Science Yields 'Gay Bombs' and Psychic Teleportation - Pentagon Spends $78 Billion a Year on Weapons and Space Research, Some of it Whacky

When Grown-Up Kids Flock Back to the Nest - Many Adult Children Are Living With Their Parents Post-Graduation

Mary Poppins Makes Way for the Manny - Author Cheers the Rise of the Male Nanny

Second Adulthood: Experts Say If It's Not Scary, You're Not Growing - Do You Have a Dream That's Just Not Going Away as You Get Older? Take a Second Shot at Growing Up in a New Career or at College.

Cracking the Teen Texting Code - Text Messaging That Parents Will Never Understand Can Drive Cell Phone Bills Through the Roof

New iTunes Copy Protection Draws Fire - User Data Attached to Apple Inc.'s iTunes Songs Raise Concerns

From news@nature.com Earth and Environment channel

Disappearing lake confuses geologists - A glacial lake in the Andes has disappeared mysteriously, prompting local geologists to head to Bernardo O'Higgins National Park in Patagonia, Chile, to find out what happened.

From Physics Org

Without hot rock, much of North America would be underwater - A University of Utah study shows how various regions of North America are kept afloat by heat within Earth’s rocky crust, and how much of the continent would sink beneath sea level if not for heat that makes rock buoyant. Of coastal cities, New York City would sit 1,427 feet under the Atlantic, Boston would be 1,823 feet deep, Miami would reside 2,410 feet undersea, New Orleans would be 2,416 underwater and Los Angeles would rest 3,756 feet beneath the Pacific.

From news@nature.com Biotechnology channel

The patent threat to designer biology - (Commentary) It is arguably a distortion of the idea of 'invention' to patent genes that exist in nature, even if the patenter has worked out how to use it for a particular application. But if you can start to make new 'devices' by arranging these genes in new ways, doesn't that qualify? And if so, how small and rudimentary a 'part' becomes patentable? Scientists gathered in Greenland last week at a meeting called "The merging of bio and nano — towards cyborg cells" were well placed to address such questions. At that conference, supported by the Kavli Foundation in Oxnard, California, Drew Endy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge admitted that the intellectual-property framework for synthetic biology remains unresolved.