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IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that the "digital universe", the amount of digital information created and replicated in a year, will increase to 35 zettabytes by 2020, from less than 1 zet- tabyte in 2009 (see chart); 1 zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes, or the equivalent of 250 billion DVDs.

Cars are getting cleverer, but it will be years before they can make up for the stupidity of some drivers.

This 78-character tweet in English would be only 24 characters long in Chinese: *R*- HSf^.

That makes Chinese ideal for micro-blogs, which typically re­strict messages to 140 symbols.

The president of the University of California described a university as "a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking".

Necessity is the mother of invention.

China was once a dazzling innovator: think of printing, paper, gunpow­der and the compass. If its rulers loosen their grip a little, it could be so again.

The real problem with mind-reading technology is that we could no longer deceive ourselves.

Men do, nevertheless, have the deck stacked against them by biology. One way the cards are marked is that female mammals (women includ­ed) have two X chromosomes, whereas males have an X and a Y — the latter being a runty little thing with only a small complement of genes. Females' "spare" X chromosome protects them from genetic mutations on the other one. Males have no such protection. Women are thus car­riers of, but rarely suffer from, diseases like haemophilia which are caused by the mutation of X-chromosome genes. In birds, by contrast, it is the males who have matched chromosomes while females sport the runt. As a result, male birds tend to outlive their mates. The big­gest biological difference between health of the sexes, however, can be summed up in a single word: testosterone. Testosterone is the hormone that more or less defines maleness (though women have it too, in lesser quantities). It promotes both aggression and risky behaviour. It also suppresses the immune system, which is why castrated tomcats and rams live longer than those that have not been neutered. The same ap­plies to people. A study on eunuchs found they live 13.5 years longer than men who are intact.

The resulting molecule kept the qubit in a superposition for 500 nanoseconds — longer than any other molecular system stud­ied. Unfortunately, this is still rather a short time (500 billionths of a second, to be precise), and is certainly not long enough to perform a calculation. To encourage the superposition to endure a little longer, the team repeatedly kicked the qubit with a pulse of microwaves, a technique known as "bang bang".

What can be done to keep smartphones in their place? How can we reap the benefits of connectivity without becoming its slaves? One solution is digital dieting. Just as the abundance of junk food means that peo­ple have to be more disciplined about their eating habits, so the abun­dance of junk information means they have to be more disciplined about their browsing habits. Banning browsing before breakfast can reintro- duce a modicum of civilisation. Banning texting at weekends or, say, on Thursdays, can really show the iPhone who is boss.

The charisma gene in the Castro family missed out Raul.

Theory suggests that the black holes which form from stars should have a minimum mass times that of the sun.

The iPad is, in essence, a giant iPhone on steroids.

The exploration of the solar system would not have happened, Mr Pyne argues, without the cold war on Earth.

Two researchers, each fitted with GPS navigation devices and heart-rate monitors, followed different gatherers on different days. They recorded the weight of the mushrooms each gatherer collected and where they visited. The GPS data allowed a map to be made of the routes taken and the heart-rate measurements provided an estimate of the amount of energy expended during their travels.

What the Japanese girls did one day, everyone else would do the next — Tokyo's teenagers have been called the "thumb generation".

The central claim is to what Dr Craig Venter calls the "minimal bacterial genome". This is a list of the 381 genes he thinks are needed to keep an organism alive. The list has been assembled by taking the organism he first sequenced, Mycoplasma genitalium, and knocking out each of its 470 genes to see which ones it can manage without. The theory — and the claim made by the pat­ent — is that by synthesising a string of DNA that has all 381 of these genes, and then putting it inside a "ghost cell" consisting of a cell membrane, along with the bits and pieces of molecular machinery that are needed to read genes and translate them into proteins, an artificial organism will have been created.