nuke-alwin writes "Stephen Hawking has traveled to South Africa in search of Africa's Einsteins. The project will create Africa's first post-graduate center for math and physics. The British government has unfortunately decided not to back the project, which is hoping to fight poverty by identifying the kind of talent that can create wealth." Neil Turok is deeply involved as well; he was recently named to head the Perimeter Institute in Canada, whose server we brought to its knees this morning.

roice writes "The crazy hypercubists who created the 4D and 5D Rubik's cubes (here are previous Slashdot posts on the 4-D one and the 5-D one) have now developed a free working 4-dimensional software analogue of the Megaminx puzzle. Composed of 120 dodecahedral cells, the underlying structure is arguably the most beautiful of 4D geometrical shapes, with amazing symmetries and no analogue in dimensions higher than 4. Though some have already begun working on solutions for this 'Hyperminx,' it has yet to be solved by anyone. Also, when it comes to number of positions, it dwarfs the previous puzzles by many thousands of orders of magnitude!"