Wired.com: Sometimes one need only to look to Mother Nature for an elegant solution to a difficult technical problem. A recent discovery by a plant expert with a bit of wanderlust could very well revolutionize the process of fueling our planes, trains and automobiles as highlighted in Alexis Madrigal's topical piece, Rainforest Fungus Naturally Synthesizes Diesel. "A fungus that lives inside trees in the Patagonian rain forest naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel, biologists announced today. And the fungus can grow on cellulose, a major component of tree trunks, blades of grass and stalks that is the most abundant carbon-based plant material on Earth." This particular fungus was first identified by Dr. Gary Strobel, a plant scientist at Montana State University, and although it holds hope for a future with less reliance on processed oil, Strobel admits, "Its ultimate value may reside in the genes/enzymes that control hydrocarbon production, and our paper is a necessary first step that may lead to development programmes to make this a commercial venture."

Five Years Too Late: Eric Wiesen, Venture Capitalist at RRE Ventures in New York City, discusses the ugly truth behind one startup pitcher's honest assessment of his company's projected profitability path in The Truth, or What We Want to Hear? Wiesen's intro explains the problem: "Years ago, when I was a Silicon Valley lawyer, a VC client related an amusing anecdote about being pitched by early-stage companies (I know, VC jokes are always the funniest). The observation he made was that every startup, regardless of sector, business model or average sale price has the same 5-year revenue projection: $50 million, plus or minus a few. The reason, he explained, was that if the 5-year number is much lower than $50M, the VCs won’t be interested, and if it’s much higher than $50M the VCs won’t believe the projections." And simply put, that's the truth. Despite the model case's solid plan, good pitch, and accurate profit projections, Wiesen passes on the deal due to the low number ($100M) for an exit and the longish time-frame suggested by the startup entrepreneur during the pitch. Sad, but true, indeed.

SpringWise.com: As the holidays approach, WrapRage, or the extreme difficulties experienced when trying to release gifts from their daunting, and sometimes dangerous, packaging will return as an unwanted partner to giving and getting. Amazon.com is going to do something to combat this foe of consumption by partnering with some of its top retailers to change some packaging materials and methods. "Thanks to a new, multi-year global initiative announced yesterday, Amazon is working with manufacturers to eliminate the causes of Wrap Rage while also minimizing the impact of packaging on the environment. The effort is focusing first on two kinds of items: those enclosed in hard plastic cases known as 'clamshells' and those secured with plastic-coated wire ties, commonly used in toy packaging. As a result, 19 best-selling products are now available through Amazon in the US packaged in smaller, easy-to-open and recyclable cardboard boxes that protect the products within just as well, the company says." What's not to like about that? And if it can help holiday battle-scarred gift veterans purchase more products, the shareholders will love it, too. Read Frustration-free packaging to unwrap the rest of the story.

BusinessWeek.com: Most people have encountered the "I am a human" test when signing up for a service or joining a website, also known as a "Captcha," but many do not know that the inventor of this test is using the algorithm behind the technology to help transcribe the archives of the entire New York Times. Jessie Scanlon features said inventor in a recent piece, Profile: Luis von Ahn, and reveals the story behind this visionary inventor's quest to use Captchas for the betterment of mankind and computers. "Von Ahn's breakthrough technology—the Captcha, developed with his thesis advisor Manuel Blum in 2000—is used by 60,000 sites including Yahoo (YHOO), Facebook, and Ticketmaster (TKTM) to verify that the entity filling out a Web registration form is a person rather than a bot. Has a Web site ever presented you with a distorted word and asked you to retype it? That's a Captcha. 'Within five years, about 200 million Captchas were being typed everyday,' says von Ahn. 'And I started to feel bad, because each one was wasting 10 seconds of someone's time.' Von Ahn wondered how those seconds could be used to do something valuable, and, in 2007, he introduced ReCaptcha, which draws its random words from the Internet Archive's book digitization project and, until the job is completed late next year, from The New York Times archive." Von Ahn hopes the NY Times project will be completed by late 2009 and continues to use this insights into "human computation" for innovative applications.

The New York Times: The layers of connections and complexities in the global financial system continue to reveal how seemingly far-away events are having local impacts of the most unwelcome kind. The privatization of retirement accounts created a circumstance wherein people and organizations invested in a wide variety of faddish instruments, including so-called AAA collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.s, and as the mortgage/debt pyramid scheme unraveled, so have many working people's hopes of being able to stop working before they die. Police forces in England stand to lose millions of pounds Sterling due to the crash of the banking system in Iceland, which is directly related to the tiny country's investments in derivative financial schemes with hopes of garnering greater returns for the effort. All this was also aided and abetted by the rather new practice of extreme and legal under-capitalization of banks, which sometimes were leveraged 30 times or more over their cash-on-hand reserves. Pair that with variable-rate mortgages to people without the means to pay and the additive nature of investments based on those monthly payments means national bailouts, recessions/depression in many countries, and high unemployment in the months, or years, to come. OK, then. Off the soapbox! Read From Midwest to M.T.A., Pain From Global Gamble for a real life story of this ticking time bomb which finally exploded.