Only four bottles of Asahi Super Dry beer are left on the shelves of Ben Thai, a cosy restaurant in the Tokyo suburb of Sengawacho. Its owner, Sakaolath Sugizaki, expects to get a few more soon, but she says her supplier is keeping the bulk of its stock for bigger customers. That's because Asahi, the maker of Japan's best-selling beer, was forced to halt production at most of its 30 factories in the country at the end of last month after being hit by a cyber-attack. While all of its facilities in Japan - including six breweries - have now partially reopened, its computer systems are still down. That means it has to process orders and shipments manually - using pen, paper and fax machines - resulting in much fewer shipments than before the attack.

Tom Gerencer's book Intergalactic Refrigerator Repairmen Seldom Carry Cash features 19 pieces of humorous science fiction. Gerencer selected the stories out of literally hundreds that he's written over the past two decades. "If you go to Walmart, and you go into the section with the big Tupperware bins that you can put clothes and stuff in, I would just write and write and write, and fill a notebook with short stories--or fragments of short stories--and then I would put them into the bin, and then I would fill another notebook and put that in the bin, and fill another notebook, and now I have five or six bins in the basement, and there are several bins that I lost at some point," Gerencer says in Episode 473 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "It is certainly an avalanche of words." With titles like "Trailer Trash Savior" and "Apocalyptic Nostrils of the Moon," you might expect the stories to be light-hearted, but Gerencer's work also contains a dark streak of existential angst, frequently dealing with questions such as: How can we be happy?

A byte of data has been stored in a number of different ways through the years as newer, better, and faster storage media are introduced. A byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly refers to eight bits. A bit is a unit of information that can be expressed as 0 or 1, representing a logical state. Let's take a brief walk down memory lane to learn about the origins of bits and bytes. Going back in time to Babbage's Analytical Engine, you can see that a bit was stored as the position of a mechanical gear or lever. In the case of paper cards, a bit was stored as the presence or absence of a hole in the card at a specific place. For magnetic storage devices, such as tapes and disks, a bit is represented by the polarity of a certain area of the magnetic film. In modern DRAM (dynamic random-access memory), a bit is often represented as two levels of electrical charge stored in a capacitor, a device that stores electrical energy in an electric field. In June 1956, Werner Buchholz coined the word byte to refer to a group of bits used to encode a single character of text. Let's address character encoding, starting with ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). ASCII was based on the English alphabet; therefore, every letter, digit, and symbol (a-z, A-Z, 0-9,, -, /, ",!, among others) were represented as a seven-bit integer between 32 and 127. To support other languages, Unicode extended ASCII so that each character is represented as a code-point, or character; for example, a lowercase j is U 006A, where U stands for Unicode followed by a hexadecimal number. UTF-8 is the standard for representing characters as eight bits, allowing every code-point from 0 to 127 to be stored in a single byte. This is fine for English characters, but other languages often have characters that are expressed as two or more bytes.

To master English as a native speaker, the average adult has to learn almost as much information as the contents of a full floppy disk, experts estimate. That amount of information translates to 12.5 million bits or roughly 1.5 megabytes (mb), while the iconic storage device holds 1.44mb of information. The data is mostly in the form of word definitions rather than complex structures like grammar. This is the first time that researchers have tried try to work out the amount of information our brains need to store in order to master a single language. Researchers from the University of Rochester in New York analysed different aspects of language learning and found the average learner acquires nearly 2,000 bits of information about how language works daily.

Editor's note: We sat down with data scientist and artificial intelligence evangelist Ozge Yeloglu to talk about her love of machine learning and how she battles perfectionism. This story is told in her own words. On my first day of college classes at Ege University in Turkey, I sat down in the computer lab and was instructed to insert the floppy disk. I stared blankly at the computer, because I had no idea what a floppy disk was or how to put it in correctly. I quickly looked over at the kids next to me and watched what they did.

There was no single moment that everything changed for Steve Wozniak. Instead, it was years of creativity and work that led to his development of the Apple I and the Apple II computers. "I look back now and wonder how did I think of doing things that no one thought of back then?" Wozniak said, speaking at an Alltech conference. Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc. and chief scientist at Primary Data, received the Alltech Humanitarian Award at a conference in Lexington, Ky. Watching Wozniak talk is like seeing a brilliant orator at work, as he talks about numerous subjects at a lightning fast speed and gives insightful commentary on each topic before the listener can sometimes even process what has been said on the previous subject. Despite his whirlwind mind, or perhaps because of it, Wozniak is a fascinating speaker and at the conference, he touched upon everything from AI to VR and many things in between.

There was no single moment that everything changed for Steve Wozniak. Instead, it was years of creativity and work that led to his development of the Apple I and the Apple II computers. "I look back now and wonder how did I think of doing things that no one thought of back then?" Wozniak said, speaking at an Alltech conference. Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc. and chief scientist at Primary Data, received the Alltech Humanitarian Award at a conference in Lexington, Ky. Watching Wozniak talk is like seeing a brilliant orator at work, as he talks about numerous subjects at a lightning fast speed and gives insightful commentary on each topic before the listener can sometimes even process what has been said on the previous subject. Despite his whirlwind mind, or perhaps because of it, Wozniak is a fascinating speaker and at the conference, he touched upon everything from AI to VR and many things in between.

There was no single moment that everything changed for Steve Wozniak. Instead, it was years of creativity and work that led to his development of the Apple I and the Apple II computers. "I look back now and wonder how did I think of doing things that no one thought of back then?" Wozniak said, speaking at an Alltech conference. Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc. and chief scientist at Primary Data, received the Alltech Humanitarian Award at a conference in Lexington, Ky. Watching Wozniak talk is like seeing a brilliant orator at work, as he talks about numerous subjects at a lightning fast speed and gives insightful commentary on each topic before the listener can sometimes even process what has been said on the previous subject. Despite his whirlwind mind, or perhaps because of it, Wozniak is a fascinating speaker and at the conference, he touched upon everything from AI to VR and many things in between.

There was no single moment that everything changed for Steve Wozniak. Instead, it was years of creativity and work that led to his development of the Apple I and the Apple II computers. "I look back now and wonder how did I think of doing things that no one thought of back then?" Wozniak said, speaking at an Alltech conference. Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc. and chief scientist at Primary Data, received the Alltech Humanitarian Award from Alltech at a conference in Lexington, Ky. Watching Wozniak talk is like seeing a brilliant orator at work, as he talks about numerous subjects at a lightning fast speed and gives insightful commentary on each topic before the listener can sometimes even process what has been said on the previous subject. Despite his whirlwind mind, or perhaps because of it, Wozniak is a fascinating speaker and at the conference, he touched upon everything from AI to VR and many things in between.

The technology world may seem to be locked in an endless cycle of renewal - but not when it comes to the floppy disk. More than 50 years after the technology was invented it has emerged that the US nuclear weapons force uses the disks in the 1970s computer system it still employs. As it turns out the Pentagon is not alone in retaining an affection, sometimes born of technical necessity, for the humble disk. But why has it survived when so many other technologies have fallen by the wayside? "They are just too useful," said Ian Rainsford, a spokesman for media firm Verbatim - one of several companies that still makes the disks.