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Behind an unmarked door in Hanover, Germany, a bearded young man with stylish glasses and a pierced lip is loading 350-year-old pieces of paper onto glass plates for digitization by a souped-up scanner. These pieces of paper are part of an immense puzzle. If solved, it could give insights into one of the greatest minds of all time: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remember vinyl records? More specifically, do you remember the way vinyl records skip when they're dusty or scratched? Let me assume you're old enough to recall that annoyance, or perhaps you've experienced that vintage technology more recently. Now think back to when you got your first CD. Small and shiny, packing 74 minutes of music, it seemed magical, even more magical when you noticed that you could treat a disc pretty badly before physical damage affected the way it played. A lot of different kinds of engineering, of course, went into figuring out how to put music on a CD and play it back so reliably. There's hardware, including a laser, optics to focus it, and mechanical systems to move the laser and turn the disc. And there?s software-including pulse-code modulation, which turns regular samples of an analog signal into bits, and error-correcting codes, which make sure those bits don't get corrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nimesh Patel, aggrieved user of Facebook and Illinois resident, isn?t naive: He well understands that the social networking company collects information about him. But Facebook went too far for his liking when it collected certain intimate details about his physiognomy, such as how many millimeters of skin lie between his eyebrows, how far the corners of his mouth extend across his cheeks, and dozens of other aspects of his facial geometry that enable the company?s face recognition software to identify him. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]