The actual firing patterns of grid cells as a mouse navigates a square enclosure. Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Understanding where we're located may seem trivial, but it has a profound effect on life. We strongly associate memories with specific locations, and we can retain the ability to navigate between places for decades. A sense of location is also associated with basic survival: you can remember where to go next to get food, or know that approaching an edge should be done cautiously if you recall that you're 300 meters up a mountainside.

All of which suggests that producing a sense of place—and relating that sense to both memories and to other locations—should be central to the lives of complex animals. But until the 1970s, we had very little idea of how this knowledge was generated and retained by the brain. This year, the Nobel Prize committee is honoring three researchers for their roles in figuring out "the brain's GPS."

A sense of place

One half of the prize is going to John O’Keefe, an American who has worked at the University College, London for decades. O’Keefe's work took advantage of technological developments in the late 1960s. At the time, researchers had known for a while how to record the activity of individual neurons in the brain, but this was extremely invasive and generally done on anesthetized animals. A key breakthrough was the miniaturization of the equipment, which was eventually made small enough that the rats could be monitored while they were awake and active.

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HP today confirmed yesterday's report that it plans to split itself into two companies, one for PCs and printers and another for business technology and services. HP also said its layoffs, which are already in full swing, will affect 55,000 people by the time they're done. For comparison's sake, Google's entire employee base is 47,756.

HP had 317,000 employees as of October 2013. The company got rid of 36,000 people by July of this year. HP was planning total "employee reductions" of 45,000 to 50,000 people, but it will now push that to 55,000 "to fund investment opportunities in R&D and sales," the company said in a presentation for investors today.

HP plans to break into two by the end of October 2015. One of the new, separate companies will be Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, focusing on "servers, storage, networking, converged systems, services and software as well as its OpenStack Helion cloud platform," HP said. HP CEO Meg Whitman will be CEO of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

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After a weekend of rumors spurred on by a Wall Street Journal report, HP has confirmed this morning that the company intends to split in half next year. The process will see each half become its own independent company, allowing for what amounts to HP’s enterprise and consumer divisions to go their separate ways. By doing so, HP is looking to allow each half to focus on one subset of HP’s overall business, allowing for more focused execution and growth while cutting the bonds that HP believes have made them slow to move in the past.

The split will see HP’s core businesses assigned into one of two companies. HP Inc. the closest of the two companies to an immediate successor to the current HP, will take HP’s PC and printing businesses, along with HP’s other consumer/mobile businesses such as the company’s Chromebooks and tablets. Internally these products are already organized under HP’s Printing and Personal Systems business, so in some senses this is merely moving a business that was its own division into its own company entirely. This split off will also see the current EVP of the Printing and Personal Systems business, Dion Weisler, promoted to CEO of the new HP Inc. Finally, HP Inc. will also be retaining the current HP branding.

Meanwhile the rest of HP’s businesses – servers, networking, storage, software, financial services, and other services– will all be split off together to form the new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. As alluded to by the name, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will be focused on HP’s enterprise businesses, where divisions such as the company’s networking business are potential rapid growth markets for HP. HP’s current CEO, Meg Whitman, will be transitioning over to CEO of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

HP’s separation in turn is largely borne out of the fact that HP isn’t deriving much of an advantage of keeping all of their businesses under one roof together. HP believes that having the companies split off will mean that each company is better focused on its respective market without the heavy overhead of trying to manage all of these businesses as a single company. In other words, each half will be more flexible/agile than the combined whole. Practically speaking HP has seemed conflicted between consumer and enterprise for some number of years now, and while it’s possible to do both things at once it’s anything but easy. So in lieu of a better reason to have a single company, HP seems content to let each half of the company go their own ways.

What’s interesting is that despite how much bigger Hewlett-Packard Enterprise would seem at first due to its mix of enterprise products, it’s only marginally larger than HP Inc. Based on HP’s most recent revenue, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise would be slightly more profitable than HP Inc. on roughly the same revenue, but from a financial basis at least this isn’t a clear case of ejecting the weaker company. That said, HP does seem more bullish on the growth opportunities for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise than HP Inc. (the latter will pay dividends, for example), which offers some additional rationale for why HP would want to split the company. In any case even split both companies will be quite large, clearing over $50B/year in revenue and putting them in the Fortune 50.

Ultimately HP expects the transaction to be completed by the end of the company’s fiscal year 2015 (Oct. 31, 2015), assuming regulatory approval and no other challenges. This split comes as the latest step as part of the company’s larger 5 year turnaround plan, which if successful HP will be nearing the end of.

Finally, in light of this split it’s interesting to reflect on the state of HP after such a long period of acquisitions and mergers by the company. Over the years HP has acquired a large number of formerly high profile companies, including Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Compaq, VoodooPC, Palm, 3Com, and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) as part of a larger effort to build up what has become the megalith that they are now taking apart. The combined companies are still larger than the individual companies HP has acquired over the years, but between the previous spin-off of Agilent (HP’s former instruments & equipment business) and now the split into HP Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, the individual companies are no longer the sort of mixed business conglomerates that HP has been for the last two decades.

Sometimes it feels odd to review the cheaper elements of the motherboard market. The more expensive models have more to play with, whereas the sub $160 market for Z97 comes down to the choice of an individual controller or two. Here is where brand loyalty and styling seem to matter more than absolute feature set. To make matters worse for MSI, one of the other manufacturers is also branding their motherboards with ‘Gaming X’, making it harder to forge that nomenclature as a brand. Today we are looking at the MSI Z97 Gaming 5 at $160, which at the time of writing was sold out on Newegg.

The first person to be diagnosed with Ebola within the US has deteriorated from a serious to a critical condition, doctors in the state of Texas say.

Roman Catholic Church leaders begin a two-week brainstorming session, on how to better present their teachings on marriage, family life, and sexuality.

Dmitry Lyakhov via Flickr

Adhesives that can form bonds underwater would be useful for many biomedical applications, yet few synthetic adhesives exist today. In the last decade, researchers have begun to look to the sea to investigate the organisms—mussels, barnacles, algae, and others—that naturally secrete durable underwater adhesives. Recently, scientists have successfully developed adhesives that are able to mimic their biological counterparts.

There are two natural protein systems that have been widely investigated thus far. One uses a chemical called 3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine (DOPA) that links proteins together—we’ll call this the sticky part. The other relies on an amyloid structure, a flat assembly of proteins that tends to form dense fibers. In this work, investigators aimed to combine the sticky bit and the fibers to produce a next generation of bio-inspired adhesives. (They tested two sticky proteins—Mfp3 and Mfp5, which mimic DOPA-based mussel adhesive proteins—and the amyloid protein, CsgA.)

The authors used computer modeling to check whether the sticky parts could be merged with the fibrous one. They found that neither protein disrupted the other—it was possible to create a single molecule that combined both of their binding properties. Simulations also showed that these hybrid proteins spontaneously formed fibers, which suggests that this dual system could in fact be used to form adhesive materials. These fibers were held together by stacking of the amyloid core and adhesion from the sticky domains.

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A fierce battle between Kurds and Islamic State militants is taking place around the Syrian town of Kobane, near the border with Turkey.

Redbox Instant, Verizon's attempt to compete against Netflix, is being closed after a two-year existence marked by criminal activity and a failure to attract customers.

"Redbox Instant by Verizon... will be shut down on Tuesday, October 7, 2014, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time," customers were told in a notice on the service's website.

The Verizon/Redbox joint venture never caught on, but things took a turn for the worse this year. "Redbox Instant has a problem that may just break its neck: The video service disabled sign-ups for new users because of criminal activity three months ago and has yet to open up the gates again," GigaOm reported on Sept. 29. Redbox customers' payment information wasn't leaked, but criminals had been using Redbox Instant's website "to verify credit card numbers they illegally obtained elsewhere."

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More than 142 million Brazilians are voting to choose the country's next president, following a dramatic election campaign.

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Cyrus Farivar

This week, I downloaded a new iPhone app, Path Talk, and I texted actual questions to local businesses near where I live in Oakland, California. In some cases I got answers back within minutes, but most took longer, even over an hour. Nevertheless, it was almost like magic.

Without interrupting my work day, I learned some crucial information about my favorite East Oakland taco truck (Tacos Sinaloa): "Can I place an order by phone?"

"Hi! Unfortunately, you would have to come to our restaurant in person since we do not take orders over the phone. Sorry about that. Have a nice day!"

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that HP will break up into two separate companies. According to the report, the company appears ready to split into separate "Consumer" and "Enterprise" companies, with PCs and printers ending up in one company and corporate hardware and services operations going to the other. The Journal says HP plans to announce the move "as early as Monday."

If this sounds familiar, it's because this is basically the plan that was proposed in 2011 when HP's CEO was Léo Apotheker. HP intended to get rid of the "Personal Systems Group" (PSG), the division that makes PCs, and focus on the enterprise. Shareholders didn't like the plan though. So after Apotheker was fired and the current CEO Meg Whitman took over, she decided to keep the PC division. At the time, Whitman said, “It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees. HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.” Whiteman reorganized the unit, combining the low-profit PC division with the more profitable printer group.

After a few years, it looks like the old plan is mostly back, and the PC group will be spun off into a separate company and take the printer group with it. WSJ says Whiteman will be the chairman of Consumer HP and CEO of Enterprise HP. The current lead independent director, Patricia Russo, will be chairman of Enterprise HP, and Dion Weisler will move from an executive in the PC/printer group to become the new company's CEO.

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Turkish police have fired two tear gas canisters at a vehicle carrying a BBC reporting team as it was leaving the border area near Kobane.

An attempt by an Iranian exile to travel more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) from Florida to Bermuda in a giant inflatable ball has ended in failure.

Aurich Lawson

Markdown is a Perl script that converts plain text into Web-ready HTML; it's also a shorthand syntax for writing HTML tags without needing to write the actual HTML. Markdown has been around for a decade now, but it hasn't seen an update in all that time—nearly unheard of for a piece of software. In that light, the fact that Markdown continues to work at all is somewhat amazing.

Regrettably, "works" and "works well" are not the same thing. Markdown, despite its longevity, has bugs. But here, the software has an advantage. As free and open source (FOSS) software, licensed under a BSD-style license, anyone can fork Markdown and fix those bugs.

Recently, a group of developers set out to fix some of those bugs, creating what they call a "standard" version of Markdown. From a pure code standpoint, the results are great. Yet there was no surplus of gratitude. Instead, the "standard" group found itself at the center of a much larger and very contentious debate, one that's ultimately about who we want in control of the tools we use.

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The smartwatch product category is still just getting off the ground, and right now they aren't the most useful things on the planet. There is a ton of power packed into them, though, and the main problem is essentially limited software. In that regard, how about running a full desktop OS on your wrist?

Corbin Davenport has been torturing his Android Wear-powered Samsung Gear Live by making it run all manner of things it shouldn't ever be asked to run. Thanks to the Android DOS emulator aDosBox, he's even gotten Windows 95 to boot up, which you can see in the above video. Sadly, it's not running perfectly. Thanks to a lack of emulator configuration, Windows 95 keeps running out of memory and apps just crash. The Gear has a whopping 512MB of RAM, but the emulator just doesn't let Windows address it all.

It's not just Windows that Davenport has gotten running on the Gear Live. He also has video of the Android version of Doom (of course) and Minecraft PE. The 1.65 inch screen makes everything pretty unusable, but it's all in good fun. If you want to see more microscopic programs running on a smartwatch, don't forget our attempts with the original Galaxy Gear—we got Candy Crush and a full Android Launcher up and running on these little things.

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