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It is impossible to predict where the open-data revolution will lead. In 1983 Ronald Reagan made America's GPS data open to the world after a Soviet missile brought down a South Korean airliner that had strayed into Soviet airspace. Back then, no one could have guessed that this would, one day, help drivers find their way, singles find love and dis­traught pet-owners find their runaway companions.

"There's a law about Moore's law," jokes Peter Lee, a vice-presi­dent at Microsoft Research: "The number of people predicting the death of Moore's law doubles every two years."

Astronauts who previously went on long-term missions endured chang­es to their vision, muscle atrophy and bone loss. On the bright side, NASA reports that while in space Mr Kelly's excretions burnt up when entering the atmosphere. "Your faeces will not be shooting stars," NASA's website taunts readers who will never make it into space.

Cephalisation encourages bilateral animals to evolve brains, in order to interpret and integrate the signals from the sense organs. And bilateral animals also have linear guts, with a mouth and an anus. That is a much more efficient arrangement than the diploblastic one of expelling the un- digestible parts of food items back out of the mouth.

Unfortunately, fit microbes mean unfit human beings. Wherever there is endemic infection, there is resistance to its treatment.

Perhaps the Wright brothers' most significant achievement was that nei­ther died in flight.

Even the task of mapping a mouse brain will require 500 peta­bytes of data storage. A petabyte is 1m gigabytes. For comparison, finding the Higgs boson required about 200 petabytes. A human brain is vastly more complex than a mouse's. It has around 86 bil­lion neurons, compared with 71m in a mouse. And the wiring that links these neurons (cell protrusions called axons) is reckoned to be about 100,000km long.

Four centuries after Galileo's discovery, it remains impossible to under­stand the solar system without understanding Jupiter. The sun accounts for 99.8% of the solar system's mass. But Jupiter, which is more than twice as massive as the other seven planets put together, makes up most of the rest. Its heft shapes the orbits of the other planets, the structure of the asteroid belt and the periods of many comets.

"I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Those words, ascribed to Sir Isaac Newton, might still be spoken, with the appropriate correction for sex, by any scientist today.

There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary numbers and those who don't.

If the 4004's transistors were blown up to the height of a person, the Skylake devices would be the size of an ant.

The Newton that emerges from the manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason. The architect of modern science was himself not very modern. He was obsessed with alchemy. He spent hours copying alchemical recipes and trying to rep­licate them in his laboratory. He believed that the Bible contained nu- merological codes.

Don't ask the barber if you need a haircut — and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

In November 1834, hundreds of New Yorkers paid 50 cents to look at Afong Moy. Moy, the first Chinese woman to arrive in America, was im­ported by Nathaniel and Frederick Carne, who hoped that her presence would make the shawls, backgammon boards, fans and other Chinese goods that the brothers were selling seem even more alluring. There she sat, her feet bound and her skin pale, from 10am to 2pm and then again from 5pm to 9pm, day after day, the performance occasionally enliv­ened when the living mannequin picked up chopsticks or spoke Chinese. Whether this marketing ploy was a success was not recorded; neither was Ms Moy's later fate. After she was taken off display she toured the east coast, met Andrew Jackson in the White House and then vanished into obscurity. The 20,000 Chinese who set out for California in 1852 re­ferred to their destination as "Gold Mountain". Many ended up working in laundries.

An artificial kidney these days still means a refrigerator-sized dialysis machine.

"If you could fuel a rocket on hypocrisy," Mike Gold of Bigelow Aero­space suggests, "we'd be on Pluto by now."

Brazil has won five World Cups but no Brazilian has won a Nobel prize.

Chief Justice John Roberts began by observing how attached Americans have become to their mobile devices: "the proverbial visitor from Mars," he wrote, might mistake them for "an important feature of human anatomy.

Mitochondrial DNA is a remarkable thing.

For every Google there are several Netscapes.