National Science Week is once again jam-packed with great events all over the country and, although it's Thursday, there's still plenty on over the next four days. Grown ups can head along to the Science Table Quiz at Doyle's Pub in Dublin this evening or, if you're in Westmeath this afternoon, you can catch some maths busking that mixes mathematical tricks and street performance. Go to the website and you will definitely find something in your area for all ages.

scienceweek.ie/


Short and tweet
Twitter has already helped us keep our chatter to 140 characters or less but it seems as though we're getting even more efficient. Researchers from the University of the Philippines looked at a huge dataset of tweets from September 2009 to December 2012 and found a global phenomenon of shorter conversational utterances.

This fits with the shortening of conversations in movies and books over the past 200 years but it's happening on Twitter at a much faster rate. Meanwhile we're using more and longer hashtags. Rly? #thatstotallyamazingandunbelievable.

plosone.org/article/
info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0077793


Google helps developers to translate apps
Earlier this week Google announced its new app translation service for Android app developers. Essentially mobile developers can buy professional app translations through the Google Play Developer Console. They give a few examples of where this makes good business sense: the makers of game Zombie Ragdoll found that 80 per cent of their installs came from non-English-language users after making it available in 20 languages.

A bunch of new cloud support services were also releases making this a good time to be an Android app developer.

android-developers.blogspot.ie/2013/11/app-translation-service-now-available.html