Morning Edition

If you haven't done your taxes yet, this ad from H&R Block might make you feel even more anxious.

"The Affordable Care Act means big changes this year when you file your taxes," says the young woman in the ad, with a smug smile. She then claims to have read "all 900 pages" of the law so she can offer you a "solution."

If you think programming a clock radio is hard, try reprogramming life itself. That's the goal of Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University.

Endy has been working with a laboratory strain of E. coli bacteria. He sees the microbes as more than just single-cell organisms. They're little computers.

"Any system that's receiving information, processing information and then using that activity to control what happens next, you can think of as a computing system," Endy says.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Linda Wertheimer. Here's a digital fairytale. In 2007, a young woman lost her camera scuba diving off Hawaii. Last week it was found by a China Airlines employee thousands of miles away on a beach in Taiwan. China Airlines offered the owner a free ticket to come pick up the camera. The memory card still has pictures on it. And who was the good fairy in this story? It was Facebook. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning, I'm David Greene.

At a Florida real estate agency, employees pooled their cash to buy Powerball tickets and they won a million bucks. Everyone had chipped in except Jennifer Maldonado. She had just started working there and said she was watching her pennies. But all 12 winners each still gave Jennifer part of their $83,000 share.

Hang on a second - I got to call my colleagues outside the studio. Hey, guys. Guys, would you share your lottery winnings if I didn't pay in?

This is MORNING EDITION.