PC's create magictricks

AI magic

Trouble with a Capital 'G'

What to do about G?

Big in semicon

Top 20 semiconductor suppliers

Smooth exits

I quit

Don't make it up

How not to interpret research

Manners

Nobel spat

Books

Most significant books?

China’s R&D rise

Squeezed R&D budgets in the EU, Japan and US are reducing the weight of advanced economies in science and technology research, patent applications and scientific publications and leaving China on track to be the world’s top R&D spender by around 2019, according to a new report from the Paris based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Annual growth in R&D spending across OECD countries was 1.6% over 2008-12, half the rate of 2001-08. China’s R&D spending meanwhile doubled from 2008 to 2012. However South Korea became the world’s most R&D intensive country in 2012, spending 4.36% of GDP on R&D. China and Korea are now the main destinations of scientific authors from the United States and experienced a net “brain gain” during 1996-2011.

No end of the peer review?

An article last month suggests that now the internet has made it easy to share an unsolicited opinion, traditional methods of academic review are beginning to show their age. It asserts that many believe that long-standing metrics of academic research (eg peer review, citation-counting, impact factor) are reaching breaking point. But we are not yet in a position to place complete trust in the alternatives, such as altmetrics, open science and post-publication review. Interestingly, at the same time, a researcher is taking legal action against a website over anonymous online comments about his work. Do we need better pre- and post- publication review mechanisms, better publications or just a good lawyer?

In brief

An Apple 1 computer motherboard last month sold at auction for $905,000. Time to look in that cupboard? IBM have agreed to pay Global Foundries Inc. $1.5bn to take over its semiconductor manufacturing activities. IBM is to focus on fundamental semiconductor research and the development of future cloud, mobile, big data analytics and secure transaction-optimized systems. Using 20,000 Amperes, the high field magnet at HZB in Germany is now consistently producing magnetic fields over 25 Tesla. The system, which has one regular conducting and one superconducting coil connected in series, will be used for neutron scattering experiments.

The Third Man (or woman)?

Congratulations to Shuji Nakamura and co-workers for being awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics"for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources". Our newsletter editor, John Grange, met with Nakamura several years ago whilst in Japan not long after visiting Leo Esaki at IBM, a previous physics prize winner. He may not manage a hat-trick but it is fun to speculate on who could be candidate number three.

Four for all

There will be four connected devices for every person on the planet by 2020 according to a new survey from Strategy Analytics. They predict that there will be 33 billion devices connected to the internet by the end of the decade. Currently, there are 12 billion online machines in operation, equating to 1.7 devices per person with the PC making up 10 per cent of this figure. Strategy Analytics say that the mix will continue to move away from both PCs and Smartphones with wearables and smart devices connected to the ‘Internet of Things’ representing the core areas of growth.

Regrets to avoid before you retire

Don't do what everyone says you should do, and other wisdom from those who learned the hard way.

Caveat emptor

21% of Americans who have left reviews, reviewed products without buying or trying them - yelp!

Do black holes exist?

Notion of an 'event horizon', from which nothing can escape, is incompatible with quantum theory, physicist claims.

NASA’s 3-D pizza printer

Last year, NASA announced that it would be funding 3D food printing, kicking things off with a 3D pizza printer. Now we can watch the project in progress as the 3D printer builds a possibly tasty pie.

The end of the stethoscope?

An editorial in this month’s edition of Global Heart (the journal of the World Heart Federation) asks ‘are we living in the final days of the stethoscope’—a question being asked due to the rapid advent of point-of-care ultrasound devices, that are becoming increasingly accurate, smaller to the point of being hand-held and less expensive as the years roll by.

NASA Celebrates 10-Year Anniversary of Mars Rover

A full decade after it landed on Mars, NASA's Opportunity rover is still turning up evidence that the red planet was once habitable.

How To Handle A Bad Boss

7 Strategies For 'Managing Up'

In brief

South Korea will spend US$1.49 billion between now and 2020 on its 5G wireless network, which is expected to be 1,000 times faster than the 4G service allowing users to download an 800 megabyte film in one second. An experimental strontium atomic clock has set new world records for both precision and stability. The clock is so precise it would neither gain nor lose one second in about 5 billion years. 24th January 1984 saw the release of the first Macintosh computer. A 128K RAM version had a $2,500 price tag.