The secrete of a good wine

In the past, one could get by on intuition and experience. Times have changed. Today, the name of the game is data and analysis. Here is an example of how to evaluate wines by the number - according to Princeton University economics professor Orley Ashenfelter,

Wine quality = 12.145 + 0.00117 x winter rainfall + 0.0614 x average growing season temperature - 0.00386 x harvest rainfall

Solve all Rubik's Cubes in 26 moves

I played with Rubik's Cube as a kid, all ended with giving-up except once. Rubik's Cube has approximately 43 quintillion possible configurations. Even a supercomputer can't search through every possible configuration to find the quickest way to unscramble a given starting arrangement in a reasonable amount of time.

In June 2007, Kunkle, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, reported some clever mathematical and computational strategies to make the Rubik's Cube puzzle more manageable. He (or his supercomputer, rather) now proved that 26 moves are enough to solve any Rubik's Cube, no matter how scrambled. For people like me, it always take 26 days.