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The simplest way to travel to the future is to accelerate away from Earth in a spaceship, and then turn around and come back. Some of Einstein's equations describe the relationship between the time experienced by two bodies, one of which is accelerating while the other is not. They show it passes more slowly on the ac­celerating body. If a craft made what was, from its crew's point of view, a 40-year journey away from Earth at a steady acceleration of 1g (speeding up for the first half of the outward leg, then slow­ing down, again at 1g, to reach the turning point before repeating the procedure for the return leg), that crew would find on their return that 58,000 years had passed on Earth.

Accelerating a passenger train to 300kph and holding that speed for 100km costs only about 155 ($200) in Italy, says Valerio Recagno of D'Appolonia, an Italian engineering consultancy. Moreover, regenera­tive brakes can recover much of a slowing train's kinetic energy and convert it back into electrical energy. This is hard to store, but can be transmitted across the grid if there is another train needing to accelerate within about 30km. And if there is not, Siemens has designed "static fre­quency converters" that turn electrical energy from braking trains into a sort that can be fed into the public grid and used to power homes and factories. This is now done in more than 20 locations in Germany, with a conversion loss of just 2% E.

It was supposed to give everyone a cloak of anonymity: "On the internet nobody knows you're a dog." Now Google and its like are surveillance machines that know not only that you're a dog but whether you have fleas and which brand of meaty chunks you prefer.

Civilisation is the distance man has placed between himself and his ex­creta.

It is the unknown unknowns that keep people awake at nigh.

In 2011 a developer who claimed his AcneApp could treat pimples with light from an iPhone screen was fined.

Don't you have a few numbers that stick in your head all your life for no reason at all?

It took a lot of effort to learn how to carve needles out of bone.

How small is small? In the widely used international system of units known as the SI system (after the French Systeme Interna­tional d'Unites), "yocto" is the smallest prefix. Adopted in 1991, it stands for a multiplying factor of one part in a million billion billion (one septillion) parts, which is often written as 10-24A new record for intensity was recently reported by a team using a titanium-sapphire laser known as HERCULES, which occupies several rooms at the University of Michigan. It produced a beam with 300 terawatts of power (several hundred times the capac­ity of America's entire electricity grid). But it was concentrated onto a speck a little more than one thousandth of a millimetre across — and it lasted for just 30 femtoseconds (30 million bil- lionths of a second (10-15). HERCULES takes about ten seconds to charge up for each pulse, compared with an hour or so for some similar lasers.

The plastic impostors (Synthetic Christmas trees) were invented by an American company on the basis of loo brushes.

Eager Utopians predicted that nanotechnology would one day lead to a "universal assembler", enabling scientists to build from the atomic level everything from cabbages to cars to human beings.

Palaeoethology, working out how long-extinct animals behaved, is a subject whose practitioners can never, definitively, be proved right. But that does not stop them trying.

DNA will be easily capable of swallowing the roughly 3 zetta- bytes (a zettabyte is one billion trillion or 10²¹ bytes) of digital data thought presently to exist in the world and still have room for plenty more. It would do so with a density of around 2.2 peta­bytes (10¹⁵) per gram; enough, in other words, to fit all the world's digital information into the back of a lorry. DNA has endured for more than 3 billion years. So long as life — and biologists — en­dure, someone should know how to read it.

The formula in question Tn = T1n-b) is one of a familiar type, known as a progress curve, that describes how productivity improves in a range of human activities from manufacturing to cancer surgery. Tn is the num­ber of days between the nth attack and its successor. (T1 is therefore the number of days between the first and second attacks.) The other element of the equation, b, turns out to be directly related to Tl. It is calculated from the relationship between the logarithms of the attack number, n, and the attack interval, Tn. The upshot is that knowing Tl should be enough to predict the future course of a local insurgency. Conversely, changing b would change both T1 and Tn, and thus change that future course.

Selective forgetting of the useless is as important as selective re­membering of the useful.