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Growing concern over the debt ceiling, America's broken job engine, Wall Street's thoughts on Netflix, and more. The effect of lowering America's credit rating. Economists weigh in on the turbulence that would arise from lowering the federal government's rating from AAA to AA, noting it could create a "further blow to the already fragile national economic confidence," reports The New York Times.

Perfect for tedious tasks, Amazon's Mechanical Turk may be the perfect alternative to hiring temporary workers for singular projects. Think back to the last time you had a task for which you would've loved to have had an army of workers. Perhaps you had to sort through thousands of articles looking for something specific, or you had to transcribe hours of audio recordings, or you had to check for duplicate records in a database of thousands of entries.

(PhysOrg.com) -- "Human beings are more or less like a computer," Jian-Jun Shu tells PhysOrg.com. "We do computing work, and our DNA can be used in computing operations." Shu is a professor at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. "For some problems, DNA-based computing could replace silicon-based computing, offering many advantages."

They missed the heavy metal explosion of the 1980s, but this all-girl robotics team from Bronx High School of Science take their name from 80s rockers Iron Maiden. They show off their mechanical talents at a robotics competition in New York

Measuring the mechanical strength of cancer cell mucus layers provides clues about better ways to treat cancer, and also suggests why some cancer cells are more resistant to drugs than others, according to Kai-tak Wan, associate professor of engineering at Northeastern University, Boston, Mass.

Described in the March 10 issue of Nature, the NIST experiments created strong interactions between microwave light oscillating 7.5 billion times per second and a "micro drum" vibrating at radio frequencies 11 million times per second. Compared to previously reported experiments combining microscopic machines and electromagnetic radiation, the rate of energy exchange in the NIST device -- the "coupling" that reflects the strength of the connection -- is much stronger, the mechanical vibrations last longer, and the apparatus is much easier to make.