You can now get wheels for your Mac Pro, should you have one. They're clearly made of diced unicorn mixed with tails of mermaid and then forged by Dwarven blacksmiths on the planet of Nidavellir because they cost $700. For four tiny wheels.

Apple are taking the piss, methinks.

NHSX, the digital innovation wing of the NHS, is going to leverage an API (Application Programming Interface) from Apple and Google to introduce smartphone tracking for coronavirus.

The basic idea is as follows:

1. You download the smartphone app to your phone and switch bluetooth on. Other people do likewise.
2. When you're out somewhere, your phone will exchange anonymous keys over Bluetooth with any other phone in range (that has the app installed).
3. If you self-diagnose as having coronavirus, you flag yourself as such in the smartphone app and an anonymous code will be uploaded to a government database. This will flag you as a yellow alert.
4. If you subsequently get tested and are confirmed as having coronavirus, you'll be upgraded to a red alert.
5. Other users will now get notified if they were in range of you, thus letting them know they've been in contact with someone who may have coronavirus (yellow alert) or someone who definitely has coronavirus (red alert).

This is intended to cover contact with asymptomatic virus carriers because of course if you suspect you have coronavirus you should be self-isolating. It is therefore very much after the fact.

There are problems with this setup of course. It relies on people installing the app, reporting on it accurately, it is subject to the limitations of bluetooth and it probably needs 50%+ of the population using it to be truly effective. It would also be far more effective if mass testing was available because the yellow alerts could easily be misdiagnoses.

It has protections in place via the anonymity of its data, so hopefully no vigilantes will be inclined to beat you up in the turnip aisle of Tescos because they think you might have given them coronavirus.

Some security researchers still have reservations, but maybe this is the best we can hope for.

The current situation has taught us many things but perhaps one of the most prominent is who the useful people in society are. The people who really make a difference when the chips are down.

It's not your actors, singers, sportspeople, celebrities or pointless social media influencers. It's your doctors, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, scientists, shop workers, delivery workers, postal workers and the others who've been trying to save our lives or keep essential services running during the pandemic. Many of those people have done that at great personal risk too.

Yet when we look at society's typical reward system, it seems upside-down. The people who are useless in an emergency are the ones we generally give wads of money to and the genuinely useful people are often the lowest paid.

This of course has always been the case and I'm not naive enough to expect society to be particularly fair, but it would be nice if we learnt a lesson out of this and started backing up our current gratitude for these essential workers with a better reward system in the long term.

I've had a few discussions with people about whether this pandemic will change our society for the better and some people think it will. I hope it will too but I'm a devoted pessimist and rather suspect people will just revert to type after this and society will go back to business as usual.

I would at least hope, though, that we'll be better prepared for future pandemics because they will most certainly occur. As soon as this pandemic passes, we should be equipping our medical services — and society in general — for a pandemic that's twice as bad.

Apparently Tekashi 6ix9ine has been released from prison because he has asthma and is therefore at high risk in any coronavirus scenario.

Fair enough, but the judge said the rapper: "will no longer present a meaningful danger to the community".

But what if he starts rapping again?

I note TSB has had some problems with their website, but the bit that interested me was that users were met with an Unexpected Error and I have to wonder if there's any other sort of error. Would you release software that's full of expected errors? I could just imagine an error along the lines of: Expected error, we just couldn't be arsed to fix it.

It reminds me of a bit of mainframe software I used to work on called JES2. It used to have an error that simply said Something Wrong, which is hardly a great start when it comes to debugging the error.

Error messages should at least point the user to a potential cause. It doesn't necessarily mean the user can fix it but it might hint at something they could try.

The universe has short-changed us. Less than 5% of it is made up of the stuff we know, the stuff that makes up planets, coffee tables, cars, otters and people. 95% of it is something else entirely and nobody's really sure what that is. About 70% of the universe is postulated to be dark energy and 25% of it is dark matter and it's the latter I'm interested in today.

We know dark matter exists because galaxies and clusters of galaxies simply wouldn't behave the way they do if it didn't. Galaxies would just fly apart is there wasn't something else contributing to their gravity and holding them together. The thing is, gravity is the only force dark matter seems to interact with and that makes it difficult to study. Gravity makes it obvious it's there but it offers up little about what its constituent properties might be.

There is a class of particles called leptons and if those particles were on social media, the electron would have the most followers. It's the only lepton most people have heard of but there are actually six of them. There are two more electron-like particles called the muon and tau and each of these has a corresponding neutrino.

Neutrinos wouldn't be on social media at all because they really don't like to interact with anything. Millions of the things pass through you each day and you just don't notice it. So neutrinos are something that are definitely there but they're hard to spot. That sounds a bit like dark matter and it is logical that scientists might think neutrinos are a good candidate for dark matter.

Some experiments have hinted there might be a fourth neutrino and it has been dubbed the sterile neutrino. Other experiments — observations, really — have detected x-rays coming from distant galaxies and nobody could explain the source of these. Scientists, using no imagination whatsoever, just called this the unidentified x-ray line. Other scientists put two and two together, worked out a way the sterile neutrino might produce the unidentified x-ray line and pitched it as a dark matter candidate.

It all sounds plausible so far but there's a problem. If dark matter is made up of sterile neutrinos and sterile neutrinos produce the unidentified x-ray line, then we should see such a line in our own galaxy. Alas, a recent experiment suggests it's not there. However, some scientists have said this recent experiment is a load of old tosh. Staplers were hurled across rooms in frustration, striking equation-riddled whiteboards. It has caused a bit of a furore.

More observations of this unidentified x-ray line are needed and a satellite launching in 2022 should provide them. Until then, all bets are off and the sterile neutrino may or may not be a candidate for dark matter.

In 2011, there were about 6 billion egg-laying chickens in the world and they laid about 1.2 trillion eggs, which is about 3.2 billion eggs a day. That's roughly one egg every other day for everyone in the world.

Let's assume that has all scaled up proportionately to the present day.

Some people don't eat eggs and I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio works out at an egg a day for everyone who's interested in consuming the things (and two a day for me of course).

So why have we got an egg shortage at the moment?

Apparently a chicken will only lay an egg on two out of every three days on average, which is just lazy. How hard can it be? I'm sure with the right encouragement — a stick, perhaps — chickens can lay an egg a day.

So there's really no excuse for an egg shortage is there?

44 vaccines are currently being developed and tested to see if they will work against coronavirus and Wired gives us a nice summary of them.

Perhaps the most sobering part of it is:

The Covid-19 pandemic is accelerating the slow, safe vaccine development process, but even the most aggressive predictions don't see us getting protective jabs until next year at the earliest.

The WHO are running global trials of four of these potential vaccines and some people think Remdesivir is the most promising candidate. Remdesivir introduces errors into the virus's replication process and it was originally developed as a treatment for Ebola.

Rather depressingly, we probably shouldn't pin our hopes on any sort of speedy solution.

What gives with the horizontal scroll bar on Microsoft Code? When you move your mouse cursor down to it to use it, it disappears. Is this some sort of game? What you have to do to catch the bastard is sneak slowly up on it, then jump on it and click the left mouse button quickly.

Who knew toilet paper would become the dystopian unit of currency? I'd venture to suggest a man with 24+ rolls is now an upper-class elite and his kids would be a shoe-in for Eton. Strange really because, as far as I'm aware, coronavirus doesn't give you the shits.

Instead of pounds, shillings and pence we now have loo rolls, hand sanitiser and pot noodles. The useless gold in the Bank of England has been thrown away and the vault is now full of Andrex wet wipes.

The bulk panic buying (to the detriment of others) is, I fear, an accurate portrayal of much of humanity.

A Russian company called Promobot created a terrifying Terminator robot that was designed to work in customer services at trade fairs, answering questions and whatnot. It's supposed to mimic human expressions but I think it mimics serious illness much more.

Sorry, the maker of the video I was display here had a sense of humour error and removed it. Take my word for it, it was frightening.

Apparently Mr Schwarzenegger isn't very impressed with his effigy and plans to sue the creators for $10m.

I'm with Arnie on this one because that robot certainly gives me the willies, although it probably isn't any worse than a lot of the customer services reps we encounter these days.

I'm a big fan of pointless gadgets and big numbers, and someone called Daniel de Bruin has built a gadget that satisfies both those qualities.

To celebrate being a billion seconds old (just under 32 years old), Daniel built a gearing mechanism whereby the first gear would have to turn 1 googol times in order to turn the last gear just once. A googol is 1 with a hundred zeros after it and, as Daniel points out, that's a number bigger than the amount of atoms in the universe. A googol is also called ten duotrigintillion, ten thousand sexdecillion and ten sexdecilliard.

The gadget has 100 gears and each gear drives the next with a ratio of 10-1, which means a gear must turn 10 times before its subsequent gear turns once. Do that with 100 gears and you get your googol.

This particular gadget is just a prototype and it wouldn't run anywhere near long enough to turn the last gear once, but Daniel is going to create a version that could run for much longer. This proves he's completely bonkers, which is a quality I respect.

The most astonishing thing about the BBC’s ducks and locusts article is that a duck can eat 200 locusts a day. I never would have thought them such greedy guzzlers.

China is going to send 100,000 ducks to counter the plagues of locusts in Pakistan. The ducks may be successful in their task but what will Pakistan do about the plague of ducks they’re then left with? Will China have to send 100,000 cats to cure Pakistan of its plague of ducks?

It puts me in mind of the old lady who swallowed a fly.

Baboons in Australia have run riot in protest because doctors were going to force one of them to have a vasectomy.

I can't say I blame them. If anyone was coming after my particulars with a pair of scissors I'd make a break for it too.

"I never signed a consent form," said the irate baboon, crossing his legs tightly.