Blog Posts by Bill Weir

This week we're talking about fungus two ways. One that can survive exclusively on polyurethane and another that can replace polystyrene foam.

Both polyurethane and polystyrene foam are not biodegradable, so without a solution, all the plastic bottles and old toys we throw out every year will be sitting in landfills for centuries.

Yes, you can recycle plastic, but that just means turning it into another product and recycling hasn't sufficiently slowed the production of new plastic.

According to a Yale study, globally we produced 245 million tons of plastic in 2006, compared to only 1.5 million tons in 1950.

One of the fungi we're looking at is called pestalotiopsis microspora. It was discovered by a group of Yale researchers on an expedition in Ecuador and can subsist on polyurethane alone in airless environments, like the bottom of a landfill.

The other comes from a couple of college friends who discovered that the sticky substance on the bottom of mushrooms called mycelium could be

For the moment, Bill Gates is no longer the world's wealthiest man.

But he didn't lose the title to Mexico's telecom titan Carlos Slim; he gave it away. And as a result, the businessman-turned-philanthropist can point to a different kind of scoreboard.

"Well, it's easiest to measure in the health work," Gates told me, "where over 5 million lives have been saved."

In a wide-ranging interview with Yahoo! and ABC News, the former head of Microsoft talked about how Steve Jobs' death affected him, his fix for American schools and his annual letter, which sets the priorities for one of the most generous charitable efforts in history.

With a pledge to give away 95 percent of Gates' personal wealth, the Gates Foundation claims to have granted more than $26 billion since 1994. While some of that money is devoted to improving U.S. education, roughly 75 percent goes to the poorest countries in the world, and Gates scoffs at the idea that the money would be better spent at home.

"Well, the

You think you've seen every possible camera angle during a sporting event? Just wait until they put cameras IN the ball. It seems inevitable after a group of students in Berlin built this throwable panoramic ball camera which employs 36 small cameras trained to fire at the top of flight. There is a patent pending and they will unveil the design at a big tech expo in Japan later this year, so smart money says some version of this will be available late next year -- just in time for a new kind of Christmas tree photo.

Here's a quick and easy way to decide if you're cut out to be a forensic scientist; flip over your keyboard and shake. If not immediately disgusted by the detritus and DNA that comes sprinkling down, congrats! CSI Milwaukee can use you!

And the rest of you? Take heart. Because revolting, bulky and breakable keyboards could soon be a quaint memory when the last vestige of the typewriter is replaced by lasers and sensors. The Celluon Magic Cube is among the first wave of virtual keyboards to hit the market, a device that projects keys of light on to any flat surface, interprets your finger-tapping and sends each p and q to any Bluetooth device.