Now here is some news I can use. It seems an enterprising German scientist has invented a computerized pillow to help people stop snoring. I'm told that I have a bit of a snoring problem myself. Gentlemanly courtesy forbids me from naming names, but many women with whom I have shared a bed have complained about this. Several A-list movie stars, if you must know. Swedish diplomats. Russian double agents. These kinds of girls.

So I had to get some stitches this week when a tray full of retroviral plasmid samples came flying across the lab and smacked me in the head. Happens pretty regularly, actually. Poltergeists, you see. There are those who say that it was a mistake to build my lab atop the sanctified Chippewa Burial Grounds for the Criminally Insane (later the LeVay Memorial Sanitarium for Lepers and Satanic Cultists), but hey -- the price was right.

The idea of virtual worlds has been around a long time. It's something of an industry now, what with The Sims , and Second Life , and the mushrooming universe of MMORPGs . It's no longer science fiction, or even just kinda real. It's really real, and people really do live entire lives online.

Typically, I am not one to discuss bathroom matters any more than I absolutely have to. There is a certain strain of stalwart American Puritanism in my blood, and a regrettable subsequent squeamishness. But I have a firm belief that Penetrating Eye of Science must be unflinching, and so we proceed with not one, but two, toilet-related technology items.

So I was in D.C. last week, going over some Nikolas Tesla material in the National Archives. Tesla, as you may know, was a mad genius -- my favorite kind of genius -- and made many revolutionary contributions to the study of electricity and magnetism around the turn of the century, until Thomas Edison bullied him out of the business. Still, Tesla more or less invented the alternating current (AC) electrical power systems we use today, and I like to keep a sheaf or two of his notes on the nightstand for light bedtime reading.