"But you wouldn't know it by how often players finish their games. In fact, the attrition (or bounce rate) of video games is pretty pathetic. "What I've been told as a blanket expectation is that 90% of players who start your game will never see the end of it unless they watch a clip on YouTube," says Keith Fuller, a longtime production contractor for Activision."

"A 3D food printer sounds like something out of Star Trek, but it's not out of this world. It's up and running at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan - and in five years, it could be in your home. As part of a project at Cornell University, a group of scientists and students built a 3D printer and began testing it out with food. The device attaches to a computer, which works as the "brain" behind the technology."

"In research that further bridges the biological and digital world, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have created bacteria that can be programmed like a computer. Researchers built "logic gates" – the building blocks of a circuit – out of genes and put them into E. coli bacteria strains. The logic gates mimic digital processing and form the basis of computational communication between cells, according to synthetic biologist Christopher A.

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) continues to improve the capabilities of its Bing Maps, a part of the Bing search engine site that’s been attracting more attention lately – even applause – in its competition with Google (NSDQ:GOOG).

Microsoft has been rolling out a number of new features for Bing Maps this week, most notably the ability to help users calculate cab fares between two addresses.

Livermore, California (CNN) -- Scientists at a government lab here are trying to use the world's largest laser -- it's the size of three football fields -- to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's formula for cooking up a sun on the ground may sound like it's stolen from the plot of an "Austin Powers" movie. But it's no Hollywood fantasy: The ambitious experiment will be tried for real, and for the first time, late this summer.

Newegg and Intel (NSDQ:INTC) said they are investigating how the company could have received, and then sold, counterfeit Intel processors to customers, according to the company.

Late last week, the first claims surfaced that Newegg had sold fake Intel processors after at least one customer posted photos and other information of the allegedly fake products, to the Internet.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin on Friday said he's optimistic that his search engine will not have to pull out of China over hacking and censorship issues.

"I'm an optimist. I want to find a way to work within the Chinese system and provide more and better information," he said. "I think a lot of people think I'm naive, and that may be true."

The remarks came at the annual TED Conference of thought leaders in Long Beach, California.

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