Wired magazine’s Nicholas Carr has written a fascinating article detailing how the internet is rewiring our brains and altering our brain activity.

‘The penalty is amplified by what brain scientists call switching costs. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information. On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the switching costs pile ever higher.’

Back in the 1960s, there was no better way for a larval engineer or scientist to stand out from those pursuing more mushy majors than swaggering around with a fancy slide rule in a spiffy leather holster dangling from their belt.

Microsoft’s 2019 Future Vision Montage: Envisioning the Future. This is an enticing show-reel; some beautifully visualised themes and ideas. If only Microsoft could realise some of these ideas. Will they ever? Well, Microsoft Surface is a fully realised interactive experience…

Twenty three is the magic number. The number of moves necessary to solve an arbitrary Rubik’s cube configuration has been cut down to 23 moves, according to an update on Tomas Rokicki’s homepage. This is in agreement with informal group-theoretic arguments suggesting the necessary and sufficient number of moves should be in the low 20’s.  This theory is known as the God Algorithm.

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Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago today, sent shock waves through the fields of science and religion when he published his theory of evolution. Celebrate rationality and intelligence and see how you have evolved? Devolve yourself here at the Open University website.

According to Steve Connor, Science Editor over at The Independent, Desert Locusts, which usually live shy solitary lives, join together in mass swathes because of an increase in Serotonin which builds up – within the space of a couple of hours – in the nerves of the middle part of the locust’s body controlling its legs and wings, causing the swarming behaviour.

Three researchers have won the Nobel prize for physics for their discovery of the hidden order that underlies the laws of nature.

According to the Guardian:

Yoichiro Nambu, 87, at the Enrico Fermi Laboratory at the University of Chicago was awarded half of the 10m Swedish kronor (£790,000) prize for work on microscopic variations in the subatomic world known as spontaneously broken symmetries.

The theory is fundamental to scientists’ understanding of the way the basic building blocks of matter behave, and helps to unify how these interact with three of the four forces of nature.

The Nobel prize for chemistry is due to be announced tomorrow, Wednesday 8 October…Jade Goody?

An elegant, charming and mature ‘hacker-warning’ was left on the Large Hadron Collider’s website:

“We’re pulling your pants down because we don’t want to see you running around naked looking to hide yourselves when the panic comes,”

wrote the intruders in a note left on the Collider’s website. Though the Large Hadron Collider’s infiltration by hackers - who appear to be obsessed with pants and nude scientists – did not disrupt the $6 billion project, experts warn that its computer systems are vulnerable — though at least their exploitation won’t initiate a black hole and destroy the universe. Which apart from being inconvenient would most definitely be ‘pants’.