• Are things brightening up across the technology industry? That was certainly the message from Intel which announced surprisingly positive quarterly financials on Tuesday. Although income and profit fell around 8% from the same time last year, the figures were ahead of estimates - and chief executive Paul Otellini was bullish that would be up again over the coming three months.
• We mentioned Cern earlier in the week after it emerged that one engineer working on the Large Hadron Collider had links to al-Qaida. But the New York Times outlines the bizarre theory of two physicists that problems with the LHC are in fact the result of actions in the future to prevent discovery of the Higgs boson. Why? They postulate that it "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather". Perhaps they've been watching a lot of Lost recently.
• Before you go, a quick plug for the latest episode of our Tech Weekly podcast: featuring an interview with Martha Lane Fox, a look at the popularity of the Arduino platform and - after the BBC's Micro Men drama - the thoughts of Vic Keegan on Britain's computer boom of the 1980s. Hosted by yours truly, you can listen here.
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