Although the office is supposed to be a place for productive and efficient work, that isn’t always the case. In fact, sometimes your workplace can turn into one of the least effective locations for getting things done. Instead of succumbing to reduced productivity, here are ten ways to help you create a more focused work environment. via Lifehacker

Does Arduino coding bring you out in a cold sweat? Perhaps what you need is the new open-source gear from TinkerForge. The modular system is designed for even novice users to whip up fully functioning robots in a matter of hours. You start with a 4 x 4cm Brick, which you program over USB, but it won’t do anything until you add accessories in the form of Bricklets: switches, joysticks, motors, accelerometers and LCDs. via Engadget

Read More → "Step aside Arduino, TinkerForge is the new sheriff in mod-town"

Supercomputers aren’t what they used to be. The Chinese are building a supercomputer with their own microprocessors, shunning American chip giants Intel and AMD. The Spanish are building one with cellphone chips. And this week, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) officially plugged in the first supercomputer that uses flash memory for storage rather than good old … Read More → "Meet Gordon, the world’s first flash supercomputer"

For a shot heard — it seems — around the world, the MythBusters cannonball misfire only really rocked one suburban neighborhood. Now a map lets you see the wayward projectile’s path through Dublin, California.

It’s just a little bit of Google Maps handiwork, but it really is impressive to see all the places the cannonball … Read More → "Map charts path of MythBusters’ wayward cannonball"

The Japanese hobby of “Dekotora” or decorating trucks with blinding lights and themes has been dealt a blow as authorities have just declared them non-street legal. They cite the colorful, “light trucks” as a hazard to other drivers.

One look and you can see their point. The trucks look like Transformers met the Las Vegas Strip and had totally pimped out children. Pimped out truck … Read More → "Competitive light trucks banned on Japanese highways"

Every black-cab driver in central London has to have “The Knowledge” — a memorized map of the capital, including some 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks, right down to the order of theaters on Shaftesbury Avenue.

It’s a brutal learning process that can take three to four years to complete, with a final test — the Knowledge of London Examination System — that often takes 12 attempts to pass. Even then, ultimately only half of … Read More → "How driving a taxi changes London cabbies’ brains"

The T?hoku earthquake that rattled Japan on 11 March changed Earth’s gravitational field enough to affect the orbits of satellites. The satellites’ altered courses suggest that the earthquake was stronger and deeper than instruments on Earth indicated.

These weren’t just any satellites: they are the twin spacecraft of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), which fly 220 kilometres apart in a polar orbit about 500 kilometres … Read More → "Japan megaquake shifted gravity satellite orbits"

The social web is great for bragging.

Snagged front-row seats at TED? Tweet it. Hanging with Girl Talk in Miami? Instagram it. Midnight run to Voodoo Doughnut with Robert Scoble? Be sure to check in, so everyone knows.

There’s no reason to pussyfoot around the appeal of these social tools: They let you broadcast your cachet to your followers, sending a quick sting of … Read More → "Wired’s 9 awesomely geeky spots where you must check in"

It’s often assumed that doing things “in the cloud” is cheaper than doing them on your own hardware, but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, Moore’s Law means that renting transistors in the cloud is more expensive than owning them yourself. Wired looks at what Moore’s Law means for the future of public and private clouds.

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A team of scientists from Montreal’s McGill University have successfully formed a circuit between two wires which were separated by a gap of only 15 nanometers – that’s about the width of 150 atoms. It is reportedly “the first time that anyone has studied how the wires in an electronic circuit interact with one another when packed so tightly together.” Along with being one of the smallest electronic circuits ever created, it has also led to a discovery that may … Read More → "Nanoscale electronic circuit suggests new possibilities for computers"