As if society wasn’t lazy enough Hasbro has announced that they will be releasing new varieties of classic board games with an electronic tower that is going to run the game.

The tower will manage aspects of the game such as dice rolls, rent, cash flow, etc. The tower “bathes the board in infrared light, and a camera can see reflectors placed on each game piece.”  The days of dealing out paper money and a banker are gone apparently. Paper money is being replaced by a plastic money card that is automatically reloaded by the tower when you pass go, collect rent from another player, etc.

Monopoly Live will be available this fall for around $50. You can still pick up the classic for around $15 if you are terrified about Sauron’s tower being able to watch your every move don’t want to drop the cash for the electronic version. But just think of all you will be missing. As one of the games designers, Leif Askeland said “The tower never makes a mistake”.

You remember the doomsday device giant laser machine we posted about last month. Well, after a series of unfortunate events the guys at CERN have decided that it would be best to run it at half power–only 3.5 trillion electron volts–per beam when they start it up again late this fall. If things go well and we are all still here then they are going to step it up to 5 TeV per beam and then by the end of 2010 hope to be back at full power–7 TeV per beam. So, keep an eye on the news… while you still can.

Methanosarcina barkeri is the most versatile survivor. It isn’t picky about where it lives and can even create its own organic molecules from scratch using phosphate, sulfur and some other minerals found in soil and nitrogen from the atmosphere. M. barkeri can even create its own energy solely from hydrogen and carbon dioxide–both of which are believed to be on Mars.

Biologists are to begin rigorous testing on the microbe to see just how much it could handle and see if it could truly survive on the red planent. I for one can see this going horribly wrong if the microbe is modified by a shaky hand or too close to a giant laser.

One day biologist hope to do a real world test with the microbe on Mars.

The good? If–being the key word–they are successfully able to achieve this it will be one of the biggest discoveries of our life times. This would be one of the first effective ways to create more energy than what was used to create it and could possibly solve global power issues in the future.

The bad? Maybe they haven’t seen Spider Man 2. The ‘star’ would have the same mass, gravitational pull and temperature-over 100 million Kelvin- as a star its same size. As you can see from the pictures below they have a special chamber to perform their experiments in which is an improvement to a bionic man with octopus arms and definitely a step in the right direction.

They will begin testing next year with an estimated live date of 2040 unless things go well from the start.

Worst case scenario we find out how black holes are made–just a little too late.