Adidas has launched a range of men’s trainers in the US that transform into a branded virtual world held in front of a computers web-cam.

The five different trainers will enable Adidas to introduce three games developed by game developer xForm into the virtual neighborhood. The games will include a skateboard game, where the trainer acts as the controller to navigate the virtual city’s alleys, along with a Star Wars themed game and music based game.

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.

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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MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables – cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are uniting as a team to create a completely new computing architecture. One that can simulate the brain’s abilities for interaction, perception and cognition. If that wasn’t enough of a challenge, they will attempt to fit into a lunch box and so energy efficient as to only consume extremely small amounts of power. 

“The plan is to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain”

says Dharmendra Modha, manager of the cognitive computing project at IBM Almaden Research Center.

According to Priya Ganapati of Wired.com the researchers’ goal is first to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. Then they plan to use new nano-materials to create logic gates and transistor-based equivalents of neurons and synapses, in order to build a hardware-based, brain-like system. It’s the first attempt of its kind ever. They’ll never be able to do it without my help…er

Where were you when JFK was shot? And where were you when you first used Google search? It is amazing to think how much Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have impacted the evolution and growth of the internet. Larry and Serge first met at Michigan Grad School (then both only 24 and 23 respectively). According to some accounts, they disagreed about almost everything. Google have created an interactive timeline celebrating the first .com Beta site launched in 1999 right up to the present. Yesterday saw the launch of the first mobile phone to utilise Google’s Android Operating System and Development platform.  Google search; earth; mail; Adwords; Chrome and so many other incredible projects. Their method of ‘launch early and iterate often’ certainly works for them as does their attitude towards Google employees allocating 10% of their time working on personal projects. Happy Birthday Google – lend’us a tenner?

Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee has announced the formation of the World Wide Web Foundation, a new group awarded a $5m seed grant to advance the web and increase its openness.

“The mission of the Foundation is to advance a web that is free and open, to expand the web’s capability and robustness and to extend the web’s capabilities to all people on the planet,” Berners-Lee said at the launch of the group in Washington.

The FAQ’s section of the WWWF makes for interesting reading. Tim, we love you.

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’.