Deep inside NASA’s Ames Research Lab, the researchers can hear your thoughts – at least, they can if they wire you up with sensors. By attaching electrodes to the throat, they can detect the weak electrical signals that your brain sends to yout voice apparatus, even when you don’t actually make a sound. They have already used this technology to drive a car around in a simulated city, and to execute Google searches using only subvocalised commands.

The planet is sucking up bandwidth relentlessly as the world becomes wired – so it’s imperative that we achieve faster data transmission with the hardware we have access to. A joint team of German and Japanese researchers, by experimenting with different frquencies, have managed to pump 2.56 terabits per second down a fiber optic cable. That’s equivalent to 60 DVDs of data every second, nearly twice the previous record rate.

Seems like a bit of a gimmick to sell their software, but if you’ve got a spare 10 minutes Posit Software’s online brain speed calculator might be a lark. A word of warning: those of us who use Macs apparently think too fast for the test to measure: it’s Windows only.

There’s something slightly ironic in seeing a command and control government like China using the market to try and address environmental problems like deforestation. Chinese restaurant-goers will probably see an increase in food prices as a 5 percent tax on disposable chopsticks is implemented. And car buyers will have to pay more for those high prestige big-engined cars.