Duncan Geere

What can you really tell about someone just by looking at their face? What if you knew that you’d have a better-than-chance shot of knowing whether they’ll live a long life, get dementia, are extroverted, prone to cheating or likely to kill you?

Does the world really need another social network? Apple seems intent on delivering one regardless, revealing Ping -- a music-centric network designed exclusively for iTunes fanatics -- at its press keynote in California yesterday

Nestled within the Mac and PC application itself (and, eventually, within the iTunes app on iOS devices), Ping mixes up your friends and favourite artists into a Facebook-esque activity feed. Then again, only registered artists can actually send out posts, while listeners are restricted to simply commenting on Lady Gaga’s latest stream of consciousness or the Scott Pilgrim OST.

Once you’ve got a few buddies, hopefully with a similar taste in music, iTunes will begin to develop “Ping Charts” which are essentially dynamic top ten lists based on what your pals are buying and listening to. It’s exclusively for songs bought through iTunes however, so those who prefer to rip tracks from CDs or buy from Amazon are out of luck.

Internationally famous physicist Stephen Hawking has gone back on his previous beliefs about the creation of the Universe, stating in a forthcoming book that physics, not God, made the Big Bang.

Hawking has long held the position that while the Universe is governed by the laws of science, those laws were created by God. He said in 2008 at an event with the Pope, "The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws."

Apple can’t help but mess with the design of its iPod nano, and the new model features arguably the most radical changes to date.

Here’s why: It has no clickwheel. It’s square. It has a touchscreen. It’s barely much bigger than the iPod shuffle and it has a belt clip on the back. Sat in the keynote announcement, I thought, “That’s really weird.” Then when I got to play with one an hour later, I thought, “Yeah, this is really weird.”

If you’ve been waiting to get an iPhone 4 without the phone part, here it is -- the new iPod touch includes most of its best features.

Apple unveiled the new touch as part of an almost-complete overhaul of the entire iPod line-up, and you can read our initial round-up of what’s new about it here. But the highlights are that it’s thinner, includes a front-facing camera, a rear-facing HD video camera, videocalling, a massively higher-resolution display and the speedy CPU found inside the latest iPhone.

A group of scientists at the United States' National Institute of Science and Technology have created light pulses called "Quantum Cats", which can exist in two states at once.

The researchers have published a paper titled "Generation of Optical Coherent State Superpositions by Number-Resolved Photon Subtraction from Squeezed Vacuum", which lays out how the team "repeatedly produced light pulses that each possessed two exactly opposite properties-specifically, opposite phases, as if the peaks of the light waves were superimposed on the troughs."

Hot water discovered around a giant carbon star requires a new theory for the chemistry around stars to be explained. The new theory could significantly alter our understanding of what materials exist in interstellar space, and where water and life could exist in the universe.

“It makes us realise that the chemistry in all stars can be much more complex than we thought it was,” said astronomer Leen Decin of the Instituut voor Sterrenkunde in Belgium, lead author of the study published on 2 September in Nature. “If we don’t understand what is created from these old stars, we don’t know what the main ingredients of new stars and planets are made from.”

Mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said, “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” This certainly rings true with Chris Maluszynski’s Las Vegas Carpets series, whose name explains it all. The photos draw out the psychology of Las Vegas through the simple observation of carpet.

Years ago, while in Las Vegas covering the World Series of Poker, Maluszynski found himself as enraptured by the drama unfolding below the tables as above them. Originally from Sweden, now based in New York, Maluszynski spent four years roaming Sin City’s kaleidoscopic corridors with his camera.

In the future, you won’t eat food: you’ll breathe it. “It’s a far-out idea. But it’s obvious it’s going to happen,” says Tom Hadfield, the 27-year-old CEO of Breathable Foods. In March, Breathable launched Le Whif, a lipstick-sized tube containing particles of food: inhaling by mouth gives a low calorie taste of, say, chocolate. He sells them at ¤1.80 for one tube, ¤5 for three. Hadfield is one of the original teen dotcom tycoons. In 1995, aged just 13, he founded Soccernet, a football-results database, and soon after sold it for £25 million.

I’m preparing to fly from LHR to LAX, where I’ll be talking to people who make television and films, before being driven down to what my writer friend Kelly Sue DeConnick once named “Nerd Prom”. The San Diego Comic-Con, God help me. The biggest fixture of the nerd year. For comic-book people, it’s the gathering of the tribes. For film and TV people, it’s Hollywood South, the Cannes you can drive to.

At a news conference in California, streamed around the world, Apple has announced an update to its iOS operating system, which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. 

The update, which brings the version number upto 4.1, adds a range of new features including HDR photography, HD video uploads over Wi-Fi, TV show rental and a "Game Centre" that lets you connect to other users for multiplayer games.

At a press conference, broadcast around the world, Apple has given its Apple TV product a slim, tiny, new look and the ability to rent content.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the previous version of the device had "never been a huge hit", but said that people "don't want a computer for TV". The new version is about a quarter of the size of the original, and fits in the palm of your hand, but packs HDMI, optical, USB, ethernet and a power plug socket (no component video) onto the back plate of the device.

At a press conference streamed around the globe, Apple has announced that it's launching a social network called "Ping". Yes, "Ping". C'mon. It's not worse than Bing.

Based on "social music discovery", Jobs described Ping as a cross between Facebook, Twitter and iTunes. Of all of the above, it's probably closest to Facebook -- artists can create a feed of information that people can subscribe to, and also follow their friends. There'll be concert listings, and you'll be able to send your "thoughts and opinions" to your friends. Which, of course, you're already doing on Facebook and Twitter.

In California, at a press conference, Apple has announced a complete upheaval of its iPod range, revamping every single model.

The iPod shuffle is first up. It's being granted buttons again, after their removal in a previous update. "People clearly missed the buttons" said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. It's also got Genius playlists, VoiceOver functionality and a clip like the second generation version of the device. It'll come in five different colours -- blue, green, gold, pink and silver -- and cost around $50 (£32).

India has its Tara Tiny and its Reva, America its Tesla and its Volt… and now Britain is about to get its own low impact car designed for city roads. Riversimple, a tiny Shropshire-based firm, is planning to put its first 30 hydrogen-fuel-cell cars on the streets of Leicester within 18 months. As our Test editor Chris Finnamore reports in this issue, this is a zero-emission business with a difference

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) will significantly extend its digital remit from early next year to provide a more comprehensive coverage of advertising and marketing messages online.

Currently, the ASA provides some protection against online paid-for spaces like banners, pop-ups and price comparison site listings. However, “since 2008”, says ASA Chairman Lord Chris Smith, “we have received over 4,500 complaints about marketing communications on websites that we couldn’t deal with,” as the complaints fell outside the agency’s jurisdiction.

Museums and art galleries from around the world are leveraging the power of social networking site Twitter, for one day only, to get more people interested in the museums available to them.

Interested in finding out the strangest object in Coventry's Herbert Art Gallery (a collection of eight knickers donated by Jack the Lad) or the oldest man-made object in the British Museum (a roughly 2 million year old chopping tool)? Simply send an inquisitive tweet to a gallery of your choice, include the hash tag #askacurator, and you might just get a response.

23 countries around the world are involved, with over 340 museums listed. 87 of those venues are across Britain, from the National Science Museum and TATE Modern in London, down to the National Wool Museum in Carmarthenshire, Wales and the roaming National Puppetry Archive.

Most people can appreciate the value of a good night’s sleep, but two studies -- which both appear in the 1 September issue of journal Sleep -- have linked a lack of sleep to obesity and mental distress in young adults.

The first study showed that teens who got less than eight hours beauty sleep ate more fatty food than those who got more than eight hours. In fact they consumed an average of 2.2 percent more calories from fats  and three percent fewer calories from carbohydrates.

An artist named Noah Scalin has built a giant skull made out of slices of brain encased in acrylic. What do you mean "Why?"

Scalin shot to fame a few years back when he created a blog that chronicled his creation of a skull every single day of a year. Since then he's kept up his skull-making, albeit a little less frequently, and was invited by the Philadelphia College of Physicians to create one for their Mütter Museum.

Multi-room streaming music service Sonos has announced a deal that'll grant its customers access to Spotify's massive music catalogue from their devices, complete with full access to all playlists and starred tracks. The functionality will be made available to Spotify Premium subscribers in a firmware update at the end of September.

"We've been working with them for quite some time," said Sonos' CEO John MacFarlane in an interview with Wired.co.uk. "We're the first living room device that they've worked with." True enough, Spotify has been very reluctant to make deals with companies who want to access its streaming. Only one partnership has emerged so far, with Nordic communications company Telia Sonera adding the service to their set-top boxes.

Edgar Wright and Ubisoft have adapted the story of Scott Pilgrim for the big and small screens -- but how do you adapt something that hasn’t been written?

“Two producers came to a screening of Shaun of the Dead and said ‘We have the perfect project for you’. It turns out they were right, which very rarely happens.” Six years on, Edgar Wright is about to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, his biggest movie yet, reach the screen.

Tomorrow’s WikiLeakers may have to be sneakier than just dumping military docs onto a Lady Gaga disc. The futurists at Darpa are working on a project that would make it harder for troops to funnel classified material to WikiLeaks -- or to foreign governments. And that means if you work for the military, get ready to have your web, email and other network usage monitored even more than it is now.

Darpa’s new project is called CINDER, for Cyber Insider Threat. It’s lead by a legendary hacker-turned-Darpa-manager. CINDER may have preceded Private Bradley Mannings’ alleged disclosure of tens of thousands of documents about the Afghanistan war from Defence  Department servers. But the idea is to find someone just like him. By hunting for poker-like “tells” in people’s use of Defence  Department computer networks, Darpa hopes to find indications of indicate hostile intent or potential removal of sensitive data. 

UK phone network Orange has announced an upgrade to the quality of voice calls on its network, following months of testing. The new standard, which Orange is calling "HD Voice", should decrease the amount of background noise and offer louder, clearer calls.

Orange promises that the calls will sound like you're standing next to the person that you're calling, which may be a little bit of an overstatement, but those who've used the system claim the difference is "not only obvious, but quite exciting". If you're the sort of person who holds your phone up at gigs to play your friends whatever song the band is playing, then your friends will benefit too.

Explosive bursts normally seen only on the surface of the sun can now be captured in a 13-foot-long tube using lab-created plasmas and bursts of laser light.

Physicists have created a scaled-down model of solar eruptions called coronal mass ejections, which can wreak havoc on satellites and create beautiful northern-light displays on Earth. The new experiments suggest these eruptions are set off when gushes of charged particles flow into twisted loops of magnetic field that extend from the sun’s upper atmosphere.

The discovery of nearly identical sea creatures on either side of a now solid Antarctic ice sheet -- 1,500 miles wide and over a mile thick -- points to an open ocean passage there as recently as 125,000 years ago.

A schematic of a seaway created by the partial collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The new evidence adds to geologic clues indicating the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has collapsed at least once in the last million years, and could do so again in a warmer climate. The complete collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise global sea level by 11 to 16 feet.

It's a good day for music-technology mashups. Following the Arcade Fire's HTML5 experiment, we've just heard that a Manchester duo called Hurts is experimenting with Spotify's interactive nature to create an audiobook version of a choose-your-own-adventure novel called "Don't Let Go".

Don't Let Go is set in an alternate world around a large house in the middle of the countryside. The listener chooses their course of action by typing a unique four-digit code into the search box which corresponds to one of several different outcomes. For example, the first choice presented to you is to choose between wearing a grey three-piece suit or a turquoise dress.

Notorious filesharing website The Pirate Bay is a long-standing enemy of the movie industry, but one Swedish filmmaker has plans to create a documentary called TPB AFK about the three founders of the site, and their reactions to being found guilty of being accessory to crime against copyright law and fined about £2.2 million.

The director, Simon Klose, who has a law degree, has 200 hours of footage saved up and plans to record more during the trio's appeal against their verdict, which is set for less than a month from now, on 28 September, 2010. In three days, he raised nearly £20,000 on Kickstarter to pay for a professional editor and use of an editing suite in putting together what he described as a "complex story". 

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Carrot farmers in the US are adopting techniques usually employed by junk food brands to encourage people to eat more carrots.

The strategy has been created for a group of almost 50 carrot growers by ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky and sees baby carrots advertised in a way that mimics snack brands like Doritos or Snickers. The idea is to test the theory that if healthy foods used the same marketing wizardry as not-so-healthy foods, children would be more likely to eat them.

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