1. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Study’s the name of the game. “Inside a school laboratory, students gather around the bench for today’s lesson: how to create a chemical reaction. Yet instead of turning to their worksheets, these young investigators try some role play. Each budding scientist dons a lab coat and begins to experiment until – voila! – beakers erupt all over the room. Their reward? Not a mark or score but a handful of special tokens. The student who makes the biggest explosion also wins the title of professor. Welcome to the world of ”gamification”, where schooling looks less like a conventional classroom and more like a game of World of Warcraft. The concept is simple: that game mechanics such as virtual currency, puzzles and point systems could one day become as common in schools as tests, pens and textbooks.”

2. Search Engine Watch (USA) – Linden Lab Must Stop Tinkering With Our Income. “The number of times I’ve had a discussion revolving around the reality vs. unreality of virtual worlds are uncountable. You can have this discussion really about any topic. Any activity that you can do in both RL and in a Virtual World is fair game. Of course, everyone has their own lines as to what is “real” and what is alternatively, SL, VW, or “just a hyped up video game”. However, for me, the one thing that is undeniably real is the money. A virtual world economy using real money is for all intents and purposes a real economy. Since the money can be converted to real world cash, any distinction is trivial.”

3. Red Eye Chicago (USA) – Gaming gone indie. “It sounds at first like the nerdiest season of “The Real World” MTV never taped: Six guys, all recent DePaul graduates from the video game development program, stuffed themselves, some laptops, Xboxes and other worldly possessions into a modest five-bedroom apartment in North Center. Aside from exchanging dirty jokes and a few other shenanigans, the arrangement that began in July is as much about business as pleasure. “The Corral,” as they’ve affectionately nicknamed their living room, doubles as the office of Young Horses—a brand new video game studio. The mission: to finish their aquatic pet project “Octodad 2″—a wacky adventure game about an octopus that masquerades as a regular human father—by the end of their one-year lease in July 2012.”

4. Expert Reviews (UK) – Blizzard Sells Off Pieces of Its Virtual World. Blizzard Entertainment, the creators of World of Warcraft, are selling off old hardware in aid of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. The ‘world’ of World of Warcraft is actually composed of a large number of Realms – identical copies of the game world running on separate hardware. This helps to keep the load on individual servers to a manageable level so that users can play the game smoothly, but it also means that if you want to play with friends, you have to choose the same realm when you start the game. Having recently upgraded WoW’s servers, Blizzard has decided to auction off the old servers. These are in the form of “blades” – single circuit boards that contain all the hardware necessary for a server, including processors, memory and storage. Each realm is powered by a number of blades, to provide redundancy in the case of a failure in a single blade.”

5. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Power of thought moves limbs. “A brain implant that allows monkeys to move an avatar’s arm and feel objects in a virtual world has been demonstrated for the first time. The animals used the device to control the arm by thought alone, and feel the texture of objects through electrical signals sent directly to the brain. Researchers built the system to help paralysed people regain the use of their arms and legs, and feel the objects they touched and the ground they walked on.”

6. Huffington Post (USA) – Spiritual Sex in an Increasingly Virtual World. “I believe most modern Americans have a very low capacity for pleasure. I don’t just mean sex. I mean being tactile, receiving touch, feeling the wind rush past your body, swimming, getting in bed at night and rolling around in your clean sheets for a few minutes. Tactile pleasure makes us more whole. I believe we all need sensual touch every day. It’s highly important for me to tune into the subtleties of sensation in my body. It’s transformational, and I can bring it into my life 24/7, from writing an article to having a business meeting. I can be present and involved, wanting to expand everything I do to its most delicate and exquisite place — because that’s what I practice during sex. As I just suggested, there are other ways to find that capacity, but sex works for me.”

7. Fast Company (USA) – Kinect TV And Sesame Street Hack The Next Generation Of TV. “Xbox is unveiling a sharp idea for the next generation of television: interactive, live-action content, produced in partnership Sesame Workshop and National Geographic. Downloadable, linear episodes run like a normal television show but give children opportunities to play simple games with familiar characters and don virtual costumes that mold to their bodies and play around with the show’s environment. A series of interactive children’s books is also in the works. Dubbed “Project Columbia,” they allows burgeoning readers to explore the otherwise static world of a picture books with games, sounds, and augmented reality.”

8. ABC News (USA) – Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 Plan Similar to SimCity’s Virtual Tax Plan. “Whether it came from a pizza box or an unnamed Wells Fargo banker, Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 economic plan is now being compared to another unlikely source: the SimCity video game. Long before the GOP presidential candidate’s plan began dominating the political discourse, a shockingly similar 9-9-9 plan was ruling the virtual world of SimCity. In the video game, residents of SimCity 4 pay default taxes that include a 9 percent commercial tax, a 9 percent industrial tax and a 9 percent residential tax, Huffington Post Politics pointed out. Cain’s plan implements a 9 percent sales tax, 9 percent personal income tax and 9 percent corporate income tax.”

9. Success Magazine (USA) – The Future Is Now: Virtual Office Reality. “The idea of stepping into a hologram for a monthly staff meeting may still seem a tad far-fetched for most small-business owners, but improvements in broadband quality and available technology are expanding virtual meeting options at warp speed. Yet, even in the virtual world, it’s best to take a hard look before you leap. Whether you’re NASA conjuring the holodek of Star Trek science fiction to train astronauts, or a fledgling entrepreneur struggling to communicate with remote partners or customers, the first step into the burgeoning virtual world should be doing your homework to find the most appropriate and cost-effective solution for you. First, here’s a primer on the available technology.”

10. Los Angeles TImes (USA) – Businesses quickly adopting augmented reality apps for consumers
. “You point your smartphone at an Italian restaurant, and diner reviews of its lasagna pop up on-screen. Or you aim your tablet computer’s camera down a residential street, and over images of the houses you see which ones are for sale — along with the asking price, number of baths and square footage. Haven’t done this yet? You probably will soon. The technology is called augmented reality, or AR, and businesses are racing to incorporate it in as many consumer applications as they can. It’s essentially the same technology TV sportscasts use to digitally paint a first-down line on a football field, adapted and updated for camera-equipped smartphones and tablet computers. “In the future, you’ll be able to point your device at anything around you and, without prompting, that device will recognize what is there, incorporate your interests, and layer on information about what you’re looking at,” said Brian Blau, research director at Gartner Inc. “Point a phone at a building, you’ll see the history, for example. Or at a flower, the kind of flower comes up.”