In the news this week... The sound of cancer. A new brain chip. Commercializing vitual worlds. State-sponsored religion in China. The rise of global megacorporations in India. Farming copes with climate change. The smart kitchen of the future.

SCIENCE

Top Story: Doctors May Be Able to Hear Cancer's Spread - [Reuters] Doctors looking to see if cancer has spread may be able to simply listen for it in the future. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia said they used a technique called photoacoustic detection to pick up the characteristic vibrations of melanoma cells in the blood.

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TECHNOLOGY

Top Story: Brain Chip Alters the Mind - [Space.com] A new brain chip under development established new connections in the brains of monkeys in a region that controls movement. Scientists hope to eventually make a version that could help humans with movement disorders.

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BUSINESS

Top Story: Virtual Worlds are Moving Toward Commercial Reality - [International Herald Tribune] It has a population is approaching one million. People there make friends, build homes and run businesses. They also play sports, watch movies and a do a lot of the things we all do. They even have their own currency, convertible into U.S. dollars. But residents also fly around, walk underwater and make themselves look like furry animals, dragons, or practically anything -- or anyone -- they wish.

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SOCIETY

Top Story: Anglicans Expanding Ties With China - [Associated Press] The Anglican church will expand efforts to help China's state-sanctioned Protestant church train clergy as communist leaders look to religion to help stabilize Chinese society amid wrenching change, the archbishop of Canterbury said.

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GLOBAL POLITICS

Top Story: Out of India, A 'Third Wave of Globalization' Emerges - [Guardian Unlimited] The world has gotten used to the notion of India as an outsourcing powerhouse teeming with low-cost labor. But India is now emerging as a new kind of powerhouse: a fount of the next generation of global megacorporations.

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ENVIRONMENT

Top Story: Climate Change Forces Farming Innovation - [Associated Press] Hybrids aren't replacing one-ton pickups in mid-America, but many in the agriculture industry are reacting to the potential effects of global warming, developing new technology and farming methods to brace for the possibility of widespread drought and crop-pounding storms.

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THE FUTURE

Top Story: The Future of Kitchens Looks Wired - [San Jose Mercury News] In the future, we'll still run out of milk, drip globs of egg on the countertop and have trouble remembering recipes. Instead of resorting to low-tech solutions such as shopping lists, sponges and hand-worn cookbooks, some predict the kitchen itself will respond to our every need.

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Featured Book: Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age by Joseph Turow Resource Page

Featured Link: The Long Tail - A public diary on themes around Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail.

Audio Clip: Making Globalization Work - [KQED Forum] Michael Krasny talks to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz about the challenges of making globalization work, and how global institutions, including the U.N. and the I.M.F., need to be reformed to respond to the needs of developing nations.