Quantum phenomena are…well, they’re weird. And here’s an example – scientists at the University of Illinois have been using an optical quantum computer to solve an algorithm without actually running it at all.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been reading articles about the looming “water crisis”: the point at which the amount of potable water on the planet is surpassed by the human population’s demand for it, leading to regional and global warfare, genocide, cats and dogs living together–mass hysteria. If the threat this crisis poses is indeed valid, the work of Canadian company Wataire, a Star Wars-style air moisture harvester, is quite promising.

The Clarion Foundation website is live, and they’ve come up with a brilliant idea for funding the program. Join the “Clarion Circle” for $50 a year and you can chat with professional writers online (Kim Stanley Robinson and Karen Joy Fowler are on deck), and get access to “…Clarion instructors and other professional writers for critiques of manuscripts and career advice.”

Clothing company Edoc Laundry is developing a line of clothing that will embed clues to the secrets of an alternate reality game in the patterns on the clothing.

Unipage firmly supports my faith in the unifying power of html. Their free Unipage Unifier saves a complete web page as a single file that can be viewed in any web browser, without recourse to (godawfully slow) plug-ins. Sounds like a potentially viable alternative to PDF to me.