You will be sick on Tuesday

You will be sick on Tuesday

People who tweet when they are ill could act as an early warning system for the spread of disease. Adam Sadilek at the University of Rochester in New York analysed 4.4 million tweets tagged with GPS location data from over 630,000 users in New York City. By focusing on tweets that appeared to mention illness, he was able to predict when healthy people would fall ill- as confirmed by their subsequent tweets- up to eight days in advance, with about 90 per cent accuracy. Such information could one day power a smartphone app that warns you when you are anywhere with a high incidence of flu. The findings were revealed at the Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Toronto, Canada, last week.

Google unleashes superfast broadband

Google has launched its own internet service, Google Fiber, which has connections so fast that users can download an HD movie in the time it takes to read this paragraph. Its pilot project in Kansas City will offer download speeds of 1 gigabit per second, around 100 times faster than the average US internet connection. The top package costs $120 per month and includes a 2-terabyte device that records up to eight programmes simultaneously, plus Google's own Nexus 7 tablet as a remote control.

Heavy metal dogs Iran's nuclear effort

Iran's nuclear facilities may have been hacked again. But whereas 2010's Stuxnet worm wrecked some centrifuges, the latest attack has forced computers to pump heavy metal music through their speakers. Mikko Hypponen of Finnish computer security firm F-Secure says he recently received a series of emails from a scientist working at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. "There was some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out," says the scientist. "I believe it was playing Thunderstruck by AC/DC."