Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder. But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life. Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.

And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

Any human whose ancestral group developed outside Africa has a little Neanderthal in them – between 1 and 4 per cent of their genome, Pääbo's team estimates. In other words, humans and Neanderthals had sex and had hybrid offspring. A small amount of that genetic mingling survives in "non-Africans" today: Neanderthals didn't live in Africa, which is why sub-Saharan African populations have no trace of Neanderthal DNA.

It's impossible to know how often humans invited Neanderthals back to their cave (and vice versa), but the genome data offers some intriguing details.

"It must have been at least 45,000 years ago," says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was involved in the project. That's because all non-Africans – be they from France, China or Papua New Guinea – share the same amount of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that interbreeding occurred before those populations split. The timing makes the Middle East the likeliest place where humans leaving Africa and resident Neanderthals did the deed.

From undead cats to particles popping up out of nowhere, from watched pots not boiling – sometimes – to ghostly influences at a distance, quantum physics delights in demolishing our intuitions about how the world works.

Michael Brooks tours the quantum effects that are guaranteed to boggle our minds.

WAVE-PARTICLE DUALITY

Corpuscles and buckyballs

Light is both a particle and a wave – and we're starting to prove that everything else is too. Read more

OFF THE BOIL

The Hamlet effect

To be decayed or not decayed, that is the analytically unsolvable question. Read more

THE CASIMIR EFFECT

Something for nothing

They might not stick around for long, but particles that pop in and out of existence could gum up nano-machines. Read more

LOVE THE QUANTUM BOMB

The Elitzur-Vaidman bomb-tester

You can use quantum trickery to shine light on a light-triggered bomb – and stay safe a guaranteed 25 per cent of the time. Read more

ENTANGLEMENT

Spooky action at a distance

Reality, free will or the speed of light? One's got to give, because quantum mechanics says you can't have them all. Read more

THE AHARONOV-BOHM EFFECT

The field that isn't there

You have to think about where an electromagnetic field isn't, as well as where it is, as far as particles are concerned. Read more

MIRACLE MATTER

Superfluids and supersolids

Forget radioactive spider bites and exposure to gamma rays, it's quantum theory that gives you superpowers. Read more

PARADOXES?

Nobody understands

Paradoxes are only conflicts between reality and your feelings of what reality ought to be. Read more

These days, sharing isn’t just caring--it’s ensuring virality, especially on Facebook. And Dan Zarrella, the Hubspot viral-marketing scientist who gave us nine proven ways to get retweeted on Twitter, knows exactly how to encourage it.

Although Zarrella freely admits that that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, he’s also adamant that, in this case, “it’s certainly a hint.” And after poring over his findings, which he sent to FastCompany.com exclusively, I’d definitely agree. Below, a look at Zarrella’s seven most effective ways to get shared on Facebook:

1. Talk about sex.

2. Solve a news mystery.

3. Don’t harp on Twitter. Or Google. Or iPhones.

4. Keep it short and sweet.

5. Drop some digits.

6. Add visual aids.

7. Post on weekends.

Web traffic to Foursquare, a location-based social networking site, has increased by 400 percent since October 2009, according to the research firm Hitwise—and that doesn’t count users who access  via third party mobile apps. Widespread efforts by businesses to tap into location-based networking are what will cause many consumers to tire of the trend, warns Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader. (Credit: Foursquare)

Web traffic to Foursquare has increased by 400 percent since October 2009, according to the research firm Hitwise—and that doesn’t even count users who access the service via third party mobile applications.

The site currently has more than 800,000 members “checking in” at locations around the globe. In addition to sharing their location with contacts, check-ins earn users points and digital merit badges through Foursquare’s built-in game. For example, a “Bands on the Run” badge was offered to South by Southwest visitors who checked in at seven concerts in one day. The most coveted title is that of “mayor”—rewarded to the most frequent visitor to any given location.

While social networking sites—including Facebook, Yelp, and Twitter—are taking notice of Foursquare’s rising popularity and adding “check in” and location features to their sites, experts caution that function is more important than form.

“Positioning a product as the new cool, hip thing is great for getting people to flood in, but it’s also going to make people flood out quickly as people move onto the next hot thing,” says Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “For a product to persist, at some point it has to transition from a hip new thing to something that has functional value.”

The report portrays a relatively marginal role for the organization currently known as IT ("fewer than 25% of the employees currently within IT will remain," "internal roles will shift from being technology providers to technology brokers" and "roles remaining in the IT function will organize around build and run.") Absent from discussion is the exciting role that exists for forward-thinking IT leaders who can help bring this future forward. The business services function envisioned in this report will have a much larger, and more influential remit than IT holds today. In addition, IT leaders who are business-smart will be in high demand to help the rest of the business prepare and navigate through this transition and lead the increasingly IT-enabled business.

New research into what we call "distributed leadership" — incorporating what others have termed "shared", "collaborative", or "complexity" leadership — has shown that:

1) Leadership functions can be spread across multiple individuals and teams — even to those outside the firm

2) Leadership can be taken on by those not in formal leadership roles — in one organization almost 60% of employees self-identified as leaders

3) Change can be driven from the bottom up-at Southwest Airlines, for instance, front-line employees took the lead in devising new ways to reduce turnaround times and developing electronic ticketing.

Our own studies of companies well known for such distributed leadership (DL) have so far validated these arguments. But they've also produced some surprises.

The popularity of social enterprise—business with a social mission—is surging. MBA courses on the subject are oversubscribed and the number of social enterprises is growing around the world. But it’s hard enough to start a successful business; founding a social enterprise that must compete in the marketplace and create social impact is an even taller order. That’s why few social enterprises have achieved substantial financial scale: decades after the first social enterprises were founded, there are few if any examples with revenues of $1 billion per year. For example, in annual revenue terms, Amul Dairy in India has just over $1 billion, BRAC in Bangladesh has $200+ million, and Grameen Bank, also in Bangladesh, has under $100 million. Perhaps there are a few other social enterprises in these leagues, but not many. By comparison, in India alone there are 124 traditional, profit-oriented businesses with over $1 billion in revenues.

Those brands with a genuine interest in customer engagement and a commitment to push beyond the expected have maintained a high profile social media presence that continually nets them advantages the rest don’t get.

One key advantage is that they’ve developed important media relationships. These relationships open doors for both parties. The press have immediate access to standby contacts anytime they need an extra quote or example for their upcoming piece. In return, the brands get an instant audience responsive to pitches on innovative social media use cases or quirky marketing campaigns. The cycle repeats itself until a particular story becomes saturated or eclipsed by a newer trend.

Right now there’s no brand mastering the press better than Starbucks. Their relationship with Twitter in the initial rollout of Promoted Tweets has ensured that Starbucks gets a major mention in every mainstream and new media article on Promoted Tweets. It is especially fortuitous for them that their sample Promoted Tweets screenshot served as the only visual representation of the official Twitter ad format when the news first broke. The company has managed to maintain this social media favor with the press for years now, also recently making a huge splash with their loyalty program partnership with Foursquare

Markets need communities. Yesterday's institutions are collapsing around us. In their remnants and rubble lies a lesson. Perhaps the biggest reason 20th century institutions failed so badly is that they replaced communities with markets. Yesterday, the primacy of the EMH said: communities were historical anomalies, sources of friction and waste, unethical barriers to "free" trade and exchange. Today, the ECH says exactly the opposite: it is only when markets are held together by communities that markets can move past the boundaries of mere informational efficiency; that they can do more than just suck in "all known information," only to misprice everything from tech to houses to people to the future itself.

A market without a community is like a bridge without pillars. It is a crisis waiting to happen. Without communities, markets are more and more prone to manipulation, crisis, and collapse — because the quality of information declines. Sound familiar? It should.

When we put markets and communities together, efficient communities filter the best information (about reputable buyers, sellers, products, services, etc) and weed out the bad information. Efficient communities send this filtered info to markets, who soak it up and yield more efficient prices. The results of market exchanges create new info that feeds back into the community — driving a more sustainable, smarter kind of growth.

In markets alone, assets are never priced correctly, and fund managers earn mega-bucks. But in a market embedded in a community? Well, the tables might turn: Maybe 658,000 fund managers are worth 25 teachers.

And maybe, just maybe, that's the future of the global macroeconomy. At the Lab, we've tested the ECH a little bit. We find that the very, very few organizations who are able to put markets and communities together turn their industries upside down — by turning orthodox economics inside out. As John Kay has recently said, the EMH is "the bedrock of modern financial economics." The Efficient Community Hypothesis, in contrast, just might be the bedrock of economics meant for humans.

So the question is this: how efficient is your community?