Forget steroids, beware tireless nerd zombies

As Christine points out elsewhere today on Passport, it's been a stormy summer for sports. Europeans are busy booing doped-up cyclists, but American sports fans have their fair share of things to complain about, too. After the Barry Bonds scandal, for instance, a chemist who worked with BALCO told USA Today that he believes baseball's culture of doping is still very much alive:

What they're doing is taking steroids in the offseason, and then using HGH and EPO during the season. There's testing now, but I'm sure somebody has already designed an undetectable steroid."

Undetectable steroids may soon be obsolete. A team of medical researchers at the University of Milan has found a way to reduce mental and perhaps physical fatigue through small electric shocks to the brain. The shocks are imperceptible and have no collateral effects, the scientists claim in a study soon to be published in the European Journal of Neuroscience. The discovery could herald the end of doping ... or perhaps the start of a new trend of artificial performance-boosting, and this time among nerds as well as jocks.