Explanations for London's appeal seem weak. There is a pool of skilled labour, English language, the time zone - but this is just as true of Luton

Suddenly, booting up is very big at the box office. But Hollywood's attempt to get wired has had comic consequences

Tongue-tied at drinks parties? Can't start the conversation? Don't worry - technology has devised an answer, in the form of a lapel badge that literally lights up when you meet somebody with similar interests.

Psychology

They've really put their foot in it at MIT's Media Lab

Peter Stephens used to be an academic, but in the past 16 years he has parlayed his experience into a computer company, Edinburgh Portable Compilers, which is today worth more than pounds 4m.

Interactive, independent of corporate control, and conceived by an Englishman - the Web is not always what you expect.Its developers have a long way to go before it matches the ideas of its creator.

Rowing

Thomas S. Kuhn's writing, though not voluminous, had a major impact on how we think about the nature of science, particularly its development. Perhaps the most widely used (and some would say, most frequently misunderstood) concept in discussions of the growth and "progress" of the sciences is the word "paradigm". It appeared as a way of making clear the nature of historical changes in the content and methods of the sciences in Kuhn's famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962 as a volume in the ambitious Encyclopedia of the Unified Sciences, from Chicago University Press.

Talent, drive and luck helped Bob Metcalfe to invent the world's most popular networking technology. By Wendy Grossman

THEATRE

A single molecule can be shown to exist in two places at once, according to new experiments in quantum mechanics. Could the same be true of living creatures?

Talking spectacles for people who can't put names to faces have been developed by researchers supported by British Telecom.

The dependence of modern nuclear weapons on a rare gas could prove their undoing, writes Donald MacKenzie