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Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny.

And while most companies still maintain their own data centers, the promise is that instead of making costly investments in redundant I.T. hardware, more and more companies will tap into the utility-computing grid, piggybacking on the infrastructures of others. Already, Amazon Web Services makes available, for a fee, the company’s enormous computing power to outside customers. The division already uses more bandwidth than Amazon’s extensive retailing operations, while its Simple Storage Service holds some 52 billion virtual objects.

Facebook’s numbers are staggering. More than 200 million users have uploaded more than 15 billion photos, making Facebook the world’s largest photo-sharing service.

Power looms larger than space in the data center’s future — the data-center group Afcom predicts that in the next five years, more than 90 percent of companies’ data centers will be interrupted at least once because of power constrictions.

The containers — which are pre-equipped with racks of servers and thus are essentially what is known in the trade as plug-and-play — are shipped by truck direct from the original equipment manufacturer and attached to a central spine. “You can literally walk into that building on the first floor and you’d be hard pressed to tell that building apart from a truck-logistics depot,” says Manos, who has since left Microsoft to join Digital Realty Trust. “Once the containers get on site, we plug in power, water, network connectivity, and the boxes inside wake up, figure out which property group they belong to and start imaging themselves. There’s very little need for people.”

Let's hope that human flesh search engines will have a collective intelligence that doesn't too much resemble the witch burnings and mob lynchings of the past. Gao Qianhui was attacked for expressing her point of view -- however reprehensible it may be.

Zakin observes that much more can be done with the science of programmable matter. One possible direction for the technology is programming adaptability into the material itself. The Programmable Matter program is a first step, he explains. Adaptability, for example, could produce electronics that can cope with heat and dust in the desert and then shift to resist humidity and moisture in a jungle environment. “It [matter] can now begin to adapt to the environment that it is put in. When you buy a tool or a radio, you’re not limited to the installed version of what you bought. Within limits, it will be able to adapt to the environment and what you need it to do,” he says.