Imagine yourself with a thousand small crates that must be moved from A to B along roadways. Inside each is part of an intricate construction that cannot be complete until every piece has arrived. You have options. One is an oversized lorry that may pass only along the largest motorways, but can carry all

“Ideas are like rabbits,” said John Steinbeck. “You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” The same could be said of ideas fora, whose population expanded again in February with the birth of Solve For X, an experimental Google-sponsored conference where entrepreneurs

Spain has just reported its first quarter of negative growth in two years, but Barcelona feels like a boom town this week as it plays host to the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecommunications industry’s biggest annual trade fair. The number of smartphones, mobile-broadband connections and app downloads

Quantum effects are vital to modern electronics. They can also be a damnable nuisance. Make a transistor too small, for example, and electrons within it can simply vanish from one place and reappear in another because their location is quantumly indeterminate. Currents thus leak away, and signals are degraded