My holiday reading this year was Gregory Zuckerman's The Man Who Solved the Market, which I finished in one long sitting on Christmas Eve. It tells a fascinating story of the legendary Jim Simons and his secretive hedge-fund firm, Renaissance Technologies. Without a doubt, Simons has an extremely successful career. Simons started a side project on the mathematical analysis of stock trading strategies when he worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) as a Cold War codebreaker. After the IDA fired him for publicly speaking out against the Vietnam War, Simons joined the faculty at Stony Brook University, where he recruited top talents from across the country and built a world-class math department.

At first glance, the black and white Robomart vehicle, with its minimalist design and rounded body, looks like a vision of the future. But if you ignore the lack of a steering wheel and human driver, the electric, grocery-filled machine -- about the size of a minivan -- is actually something of a throwback. For much of U.S. history, perishable kitchen items such as produce, milk, eggs and ice arrived outside people's homes on a daily basis, first by horse-drawn wagon and later by truck. This curbside service would eventually fall victim to refrigeration, automobiles and the rise of the supermarket, making weekly shopping trips the modern American norm, according to Boston Hospitality Review. Now Robomart -- a Santa Clara, Calif.-based start-up -- seeks to merge the old with the new.

At first glance, the black and white Robomart, with its minimalist design and rounded body, looks like a vision of the future. But if you ignore the lack of steering wheels and human drivers, the electric vehicle -- about the size of a minivan -- is actually something of a throwback. For much of American history, perishable kitchen items like produce, milk, eggs and ice arrived outside people's homes on a daily basis, first by horse-drawn wagon and later by truck. This curbside service would eventually fall victim to refrigeration, automobiles and the rise of the supermarket, making weekly shopping trips the modern American norm, according to Boston Hospitality Review. Now Robomart -- a Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup -- seeks to merge the old with the new.

Scientists exploring the Ecuadorian Amazon have discovered a new species of parasitic wasp that turns its victims into zombies. In what the researchers say is a particularly'hardcore' form of hijacking, these wasps first make normally social spiders turn their backs on their own colonies, before spinning a cocoon for the larvae that will eventually eat it. The gruesome attack stands out from most other known instances of wasp parasitism, being unusual in that it does not target a solitary spider species, as is usually the case. In what the researchers say is a particularly'hardcore' form of hijacking, these wasps first make normally social spiders turn their backs on their own colonies, before spinning a cocoon for the larvae that will eventually eat it'Wasps manipulating the behaviour of spiders has been observed before, but not at a level as complex as this,' said Philippe Fernandez-Fournier, lead author of the study and former master's student at UBC's department of zoology. 'Not only is this wasp targeting a social species of spider but it's making it leave its colony, which it rarely does.'