Filed under: Products and services, Launches, News Corp’B’ (NWS), Entrepreneurs, Media World

The New York Times has it all — a story that mixes wrestling, Fox Business News (FBN), a hawker of sex potions, and bank analyst extraordinaire — Meredith Whitney. This could well be the best business story of 2008.

John C. Layfield is the FBN commentator, former wrestler and hawker of a sex potion. Layfield sells Mamajuana Energy, a berry-flavored liquid that he developed and sells for $4.99 or less. He bills the two-ounce shots as an all-natural “sexual endurance drink” for men. Mamajuana - typically made from soaking tree bark and herbs in rum - has long been part of Dominican culture. And Layfield now bills it as liquid Viagra.

Is his wife, Meredith Whitney, a beneficiary of this potion? It’s not clear how much profit it generates for Layfield’s company but the Times reports that she’s an investor in the company. And health supplement retailer, The Vitamin Shoppe, decided to stock Mamajuana Energy in its 340 stores. No doubt Layfield is relishing the chance to join his wife in the media spotlight with the publicity over Mamajuana. I only wonder whether the Times will regret the help it’s giving to arch-rival, News Corp. (NYSE: NWS).

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in News Corp.

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epsas writes “On Cosmonaut’s Day (April 12th 2008) the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) announced that they’ll cease it’s $40,000,000-a-flight space tourism enterprise. Vitaly Perminov, the head of Roskosmos, elaborated on this statement by citing national criticism of the space tourism project; all the while reiterating Roskosmos’s focus on the International Space Station and the new launch site at Vostochny Cosmodrome: ‘Vitaly Lopota, the president of the Energia space rocket corporation, stated he believes space tourism is a forced measure compensating for insufficient financing of the Russian space program.’ This statement (made the day before) by Vitaly Lopota follows another announcement that ‘Energia is ready to send missions to the Moon and Mars if told to do so by the government.’”

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the_kanzure writes “I’m going to begin at a university lab a few days after my high school graduation ceremony. The lab is an eclectic blend of computer science, evolutionary engineering and molecular biology, essentially it’s research/development and — best of all — the research is worth something to me and my other pet projects. What I do know of science, tech and research has been gleaned from the internet. The open access research repositories (arxiv, PLoS, etc.) have been a life-saver. But showing up to get real, hard experience is not the same as those late hours into the night spent debugging software. In person, you can’t just call up a favorite bash script to open up a few hundred tabs to do some swift research on feasability and past research … how is this supposed to work — does anybody really get stuff done this way? So I’ve been wondering how Slashdotters have handled transitioning from learning in front of a screen and a good net connection, to actually showing up and getting stuff done. What’s a first day like in a lab? Stories? What’s the etiquette? Informal? In programing circles, you can always submit a patch and alternatives, but does this hold here? Is the professor still generally considered the PHB and the lowly undergrads are his minions to carry out his bidding?”

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Xandu writes “A documentary film about the BLAST balloon-borne telescope is about to premiere at the Toronto Hot Docs film festival. BLAST is a submillimeter telescope that floats on a balloon 37km in the air while observing the earliest star-formation and earliest galaxies. It’s two science flights have been covered on Slashdot, the first from Kiruna, Sweden and the second from McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Virtually all the software used on BLAST is open source, and the kst display program has been discussed here as well. If you live in or near Toronto, it’s showing twice, Tuesday evening and Saturday afternoon. The film contrasts the science with the human element and hardships endured while working in such exotic locations. Naturally, the movie trailer is on the internet.”

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Roland Piquepaille writes “Researchers working for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission have discovered that the Earth’s magnetic tail could be harmful to future astronauts. The moon stays inside Earth’s ‘magnetotail’ for six days every month — during full moon. This can have consequences ranging from lunar ‘dust storms’ to strong electrostatic discharges, according to one researcher quoted by NASA in ‘The Moon and the Magnetotail.’ So far, this is pure speculation: no man has been on the moon when the magnetotail hits. As added the same scientist, ‘Apollo astronauts never landed on a full moon and they never experienced the magnetotail.’ But read more for additional details about how Earth’s magnetotail could affect men on the moon.”

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Bibek Paudel point us to a BusinessWeek report on Google’s interest in the cataloging and examining of people’s DNA. Google has recently invested in DNA screening firms Navigenics and 23andMe, which test customers’ DNA for characteristics such as ancestry and predisposition for certain diseases. The customers are then able to give the information to their physicians. This isn’t Google’s first foray into the medical industry. “Google wants to plant an early stake in a potentially big new market around genetic data. ‘We are interested in supporting companies and making investments in companies that [bolster] our mission statement, which is organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful,’ Google spokesman Andrew Pederson states. ‘We felt it was important to get involved now, at the early stage, to superior comprehend the information generated by this fast-moving field.’”

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An anonymous reader writes “Professor Edward N. Lorenz, who discovered in 1961 that subtle changes in the initial conditions of a weather simulation program could cause very big differences in its results, died of cancer Wednesday at the age of 90. The contributions of the dad of chaos theory, who coined the term ‘the butterfly effect’ and also discovered the Lorenz Attractor, are ideal summarized by the wording of the Kyoto Prize in 1991 which noted that his discovery of chaos theory ‘profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.’”

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CWRUisTakingMyMoney writes “Yahoo! Finance has a story about the defunct Soviet Union’s .su TLD. ‘Sixteen years after the superpower’s collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet “.su” domain name have been rising — registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts to extinguish the on the web Soviet outpost.’”

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