1. Gobar gas. Using relatively cheap materials, it is possible to build a “digester” that turns dung into natural gas. Gobar gas has had a lot of success in the Indian subcontinent. It seems like this could be an excellent way to provide safer cooking fuels for rural people in developing countries (as opposed to using wood for cooking fuel, which produces indoor smoke which is often a health hazard and which uses up the trees in forests).

2 Computer learns language by playing games. A computer was able to learn to read the text of a computer game manual (without having any prior English language knowledge programmed into it) and learn how to improve its gameplay strategy (in the game Civilization 2). My favorite Skynet-related comment left by a reader: “I’m curious about which victory conditions the AI tended towards. I’m hoping it was space colonization and not world domination.” As it turns out, the computer’s strategy was world domination (winning the game by conquering all other civilizations through warfare).

3. Driven off the Road by M.B.A.s. “Lutz’s main argument is that companies, shareholders and consumers are best served by product-driven executives. . . . The auto industry is actually a terrific proxy for a trend toward short-term, myopically balance-sheet-driven management that has infected American business.”

4. On discovering you’re an android. “The idea that the self, or the conscious mind, emerges from the workings of the physical structures of the brain – with no need to invoke any supernatural spirit, essence or soul – is so fundamental to modern neuroscience that it almost goes unmentioned.”

5. Power powers promiscuity, new study finds. “With power comes confidence, and for both men and women, such confidence often results in marital infidelity, a new study finds. The study, to be published in an upcoming Psychological Science, found that among 1,275 Dutch professionals, those with the higher-paying, higher-ranked positions were more likely to have thought about or actually engaged in extra-marital entanglements, thanks to boosted levels of confidence. . . . The powerful see the world, themselves, and other people in a different manner and they act in a different manner than do those who lack power.”

6. 6 premature predictions of tech failure. A list of 6 technologies / products that industry leaders wrongly predicted would fail.