North Carolina

Lenovo Group expects wireless Internet products to account for up to 80 percent of its sales within five years as it pursues expansion in faster-growing emerging markets, CEO Yang Yuanqing said Friday.

Lenovo, the world's fourth-largest personal computer maker, jumped into the mobile Internet market in January with the unveiling of a smart phone and two Web-linked portable computers.

Jared Starkey is going all out for Google broadband. The day after Google said it would provide high-speed Internet access to as many as 500,000 people around the U.S., Starkey set up a Facebook page to lobby Google to bring the service to his hometown, Topeka, Kan. Since then, Starkey has passed out bright-orange necklaces made of the kind of fiber-optic cable used to deliver fast Web connections and rallied 100 people to show up at a downtown redevelopment meeting wearing T-shirts that play on Google's motto for the broadband plan.

With its sterling reputation and its scientific bent, Shanghai Jiaotong University has the feel of an Ivy League institution.

The university has alliances with elite American ones like Duke and the University of Michigan. And it is so rich in science and engineering talent that Microsoft and Intel have moved into a research park adjacent to the school.

But Jiaotong, whose campus here has more than 33,000 students, is facing an unpleasant question: Is it a base for sophisticated computer hackers?

Google and other Internet sites aren't making us stupid: They're making us smarter, according to an overwhelming majority of 895 experts surveyed by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University.

"Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge," study co-author Janna Anderson said in a statement Friday.

States looking to unload surplus property used to do little more than take out an advertisement in the local newspaper, hang an "Open" sign at a warehouse and set up a cash register.

Not anymore. This spring, Vermont will begin selling its surplus goods on eBay, the online auction site. The goal is to attract more bidders and bring in more revenue to state coffers, says Mark Casey, the state's Surplus Property Programs assistant.

"We can move a lot more stuff," Casey says from his office at the warehouse in the central Vermont town of Waterbury.

Carl Zimmer in National Geographic:

Ramin Bahrani is the director of such films as Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and the new Goodbye Solo.