Top ten Edinburgh Fringe jokes

The judges sat through hours of material before nominating their favourite three gags for the shortlist.

The Who, What, and When of iPhone and iPad Usage

All advertisers seek to deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment. If content is king, then context is queen – particularly when it comes to mobile devices that are typically close at hand if not in our hands.

People to avoid?

9 People You Must Remove From Your Inner Circle. When you're trying to get a business off the ground, the people you surround yourself with matter. Keep these nine types at a distance.

Watermelon, watermelon I love you love watermelon

Watermelon juice relives post-exercise muscle soreness

The recruitment stories - honest!

Top recruiter lies
Top candidate lies

Wireless connections without an on-board battery

Devices that can make wireless connections even without an onboard battery could spread computing power into everything you own.

In brief

The UK based vacuum product manufacturer Edwards Group Limited will be acquired  by the Swedish Atlas Copco Group for approximately $1.6 billion.

NPL demonstrates possible use of terahertz time-domain spectroscopy to help spot fakes and combat textile counterfeiting.

Walls could have ears, Princeton University have embedded ultrathin radios directly on plastic sheets, which can be applied to walls and other structures.

115 and counting

An international team of researchers, led by physicists from Lund University, have confirmed the existence of what is considered a new element with atomic number 115 . The experiments were conducted at the GSI research facility in Germany. A full report will be in Physical Review Letters. However as all science fiction aficionados already know, element 115 (Ununpentium) is amongst other things, the gravity wave generator that powers UFOs and within a meteorite acquired by Lara Croft in Tomb Raider III.

Quicker to walk

If we cannot have a food replicator, how about teleportation? Sadly a group of MPhys students at the University of Leicester have severe doubts about the viability of this transportation method. They note that every human that is teleported will need to be represented in transferable data. This would be a mix of physical DNA and genomic data coupled with the information contained in the travellers brain. The students estimate the total information content to be around 2.6 x 10⁴² bits. Using a teleportation bandwidth of 29.5 to 30 GHz, the students calculated that the data transfer would require up to 4.85 x 10¹⁵ years. The universe is thought to only be around 14 billion years old.

Coal powers the cloud

Last month’s report by Digital Power Group into the electricity used by ICT systems states that global internet, data and cloud systems consume 1500 TW of electricity annually. This is equal to the combined generation of Japan and Germany. The report notes that coal is the world’s single current and future source of electricity. In addition, controversy has been caused by the claim that when taking into account the totality of the network and cloud infrastructure, watching an hour of video weekly on a tablet or smart phone consumes annually more electricity than two new refrigerators.

Customer congratulations

We send our congratulations to Professor Henning Sirringhaus (University of Cambridge) on being awarded the Royal Society’s Hughes Medal for his work on inkjet printing processes for organic semiconductor devices. Also, best wishes to Dr Jon Heffernan on being appointed the new Director of the National Centre for III-V Technologies at Sheffield.

It’s food, Jim, but not as we know it.

In the absence of Star Trek’s food replicator, sustainably feeding the planet’s burgeoning population is a concern. Leaving aside any ethical considerations, accessing protein using livestock production is an inefficient process as well as a significant generator of methane. The increased use and farming of insects is being promoted as one route forward. Meanwhile scientists at Maastricht University have produced and eaten the first synthetic meat burger made from muscle stem cells. This cultured, in vitro meat, could be the beginnings of a new meat production technique thus keeping the many carnivores amongst us happy.

However at a cost of over £200,000 for this burger the 69 million people who daily visit a well known fast food outlet might be in for a shock.

RTA Instruments expansion

We have moved into new larger premises on the same site, providing more space and a better working environment. All our contact details remain the same.