Plus: Silicon Valley’s Fight Club for Programmers and a Rocket-Powered Drug-Delivery System.

A Rocket-Powered Drug-Delivery System
German scientists are experimenting with nanorockets, powered by safe rocket fuel, as a way to carry drugs around the human body through blood, urine or saliva, according to New Scientist this week.

The tiny, platinum-lined rockets are propelled by a peroxide-based fuel that reacts with the platinum and forces bubbles through one end of the tube, resulting in speeds “faster than the fastest bacteria.” Scientists steer the rockets using magnetic fields and use fluid temperature to control speed.

One of the project’s key challenges is making a fuel that isn’t too toxic to use in the body. The current formula, which is only 0.25 percent peroxide, still contains too much peroxide to be entirely safe.

Latest Victim of the Economy: Lunch
Approximately one-third of employees eat lunch at their desk each day, while another one-third rarely takes a lunch break at all, according to a survey by ManpowerGroup’s Right Management.

“Lunch patterns allow us to infer a few things about the North American workplace, and one thing that we already know is that the pressure for productivity and performance can be relentless,” according to Michael Haid, senior VP of talent management at the workforce consultancy. “This pressure is showing up in various ways like our finding that one in three employees [is] very likely now in the habit of taking lunch but at their computers and phones and with supervisors and colleagues. So whether it’s a true break is open to question.”

Based on a summer poll of 751 North American workers, Right Management found that almost as many employees who “almost always” take a break for lunch (35 percent) usually do so at their desk (34 percent). Then there are 31 percent who seldom if ever take a lunch break (16 percent) or just once in a while (15 percent).

“Sure, workers may feel devoted to their work, which is fine,” Haid said in an announcement of the findings. “But given the level of stress in today’s workplace, I wonder [if] the reluctance to take a break is an expression of devotion or a negative consequence of the unrelenting pressure some organizations are exerting on their workforces to get more done with fewer resources.”

Here’s a Hobby for Tech Pros
We all know that work can be stressful and that it is crucial to engage in a hobby outside of work, whether it’s playing golf, cooking, DIY home projects or, apparently, joining your local fight club.

Sick of cubicle life, programmers from Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, like Google, Apple and Yahoo, have started a fight club, as documented in Uppercut, a short documentary that is part of Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari‘s California Is a Place series:

Uppercut from California Is a Place via The Atlantic

Cheers.