"The corridor connecting Cambridge, Milton Keynes, and Oxford could be the UK's Silicon Valley," the Infrastructure Commission said in a report published this week. The report recommended bringing forward £100 million in funding to create a western section of the East West Rail project by 2024, and that the government should commit up to a further £10 million in development funding to continue work on the central section, the part that would link Oxford with Cambridge. There used to be a rail link between Oxford and Cambridge but it was closed in 1967. It currently takes two and a half hours and two changes via London to travel by train between the university cities. The report describes the journey as "difficult, slow and unreliable," contrasting it to the strong north-south links to and from London.

Some of the smartest minds in the UK are being lured away from their research positions at Oxford and Cambridge by DeepMind -- a London-based AI lab that was acquired by Google for £400 million in 2014. More than a dozen AI researchers have left the academic powerhouses over the last couple of years for what are likely to be better-paid roles at DeepMind, according to LinkedIn. Steven Cave, the director of Cambridge University's new Centre for the Future of Intelligence, believes that the exodus of talent from academia to corporates is something of a problem. "The best people are being offered huge sums of money to go and work at these tech companies," Cave told Business Insider in Cambridge last week. "You find that you're talking to someone and they're expressing a great deal of interest in a research project and then they're snapped up. We understand that ambitious young people want to work at these big name companies and earn lots of money and that's fine. But at the same time we hope that there will be enough bright young things who are motivated by the intellectual challenge of the issues we're working on and by the sense of wanting to do something good that makes a difference for the world."