China is primed to earn a proverbial bronze medal within the next week as the third country to conduct a space walk. The launch of China's third manned space mission should occur between today and next Tuesday from the Jiquan launch pad in Inner Mongolia. Some Chinese media report that this statement-making event will occur at 9 this evening.

As a newly minted WoW-head (that's World of Warcraft for you noobs), I've always wondered just how all those "gold farmers" who try to sell virtual gold within in the game came by their vast, ill-gotten riches. I'd heard rumors of sweatshops in China where people are forced to drink Mountain Dew and kill Fel Orcs for 16 hours straight, but that sounded too strange to be true -- and, at the same time, not too different from the average college dormitory.

The death toll from the Sichuan earthquake is reportedly upwards of 55,000 at this point. Many survivors are living outside, in tents, afraid that aftershocks will topple their homes. But officials are also trying to care for the animal population, sending food to the animals at the China Giant Panda Protection and Research Center, which is just about 20 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake.

Texas Tech geophysicist Hua-wei Zhou touched down in Beijing just 40 minutes before the devastating Sichuan province earthquake struck. He and his colleagues were planning to embark on a project to set up 60 seismometers designed to listen for mini-quakes at the Three Gorges reservoir.

Our own Theodore Gray (the man behind Gray Matter's mad science) is currently in China, and he's taken the opportunity to put his new Casio EX-F1 high-speed camera to excellent use at the Beijing Zoo. And when we say excellent we mean the majestic hawk at the Beijing zoo defecating and flapping its wings at 300 frames per second kind of excellent. And if that's not enough, he's got a dolphin leaping from beneath the water and a sparrow taking flight to boot.

The death tolls from the massive earthquake that shook China on Monday have reportedly climbed as high as 13,000 people. More than 18,000 people are still unaccounted for in Mianyang in Sichuan province. And soldiers and medics have just broken through to reach the city of Wenchuan - home to a population of 100,000 - which sits right at the epicenter of the quake.

Used to be, you had to connect your PC to the Internet first before it became bloated with viruses and spyware. Now all it may take is plugging in a brand new iPod or digital picture frame—recently, new peripheral devices have been arriving in stores with viruses pre-installed. The problem is most likely stemming from poor quality control in Chinese factories when devices are tested before packaging. As office IT personnel well know, all it takes is one infected machine to spoil the entire network.