Gamers have devoted countless years of collective brainpower to rescuing princesses or protecting the planet against alien invasions. Researchers at the University of Washington are trying to harness those finely honed skills to make medical discoveries, perhaps even finding a cure for HIV.

I won't have time to post the latest newsletter for the Science Shelf Book Review Archive or mail it to subscribers for a few days, but here's a link.

Read on for a bit more.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services, which connect individual users for simultaneous uploads and downloads directly rather than through a central server, are reported to account for as much as 70 percent of Internet traffic worldwide.

In 2004, the Detroit Pistons found the piece that made them complete. Listen up, theoretical physicists and pioneers of biotechnology. You have a need: the Need for Sheed.

Preschool children 2 years and older should spend no more than two hours a day watching television and using the computer. That's according to recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Javier the Engineer takes you on a tour of the Center for Advanced Technology. Learn about the latest developments in carbon fiber toothpick technology and recent advancements in pizza stem-cell research.

Television news audiences are divided along party lines like never before, according to a new University of Georgia study that warns the trend may have damaging consequences for political discourse and democracy in America.

Computer scientists have created a fog and smoke machine for computer graphics that cuts the computational cost of making realistic smoky and foggy 3-D images, such as beams of light from a lighthouse piercing thick fog.

I tagged this with every category since I review books in all realms of science.

Though I plan to maintain my Science Shelf archive of book reviews, I will now also publish the reviews on Science Blog.

The fight to make Pluto a planet again is picking up momentum. Maybe a little presidential politics will be able to resolve the dispute. In unrelated news, cancer still isn't cured.