Surprising tech stories today

Today in my roundup of web stuff that I look at, I came across two stories which feature some pretty impressive advanced technology:

1) Computers trained to trade stocks on the nanosecond level have been causing micro runs and busts in the stock market that are too small for normal traders to notice, let alone react to:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/high-speed-trading

The analysis involved five years of stock market trading data gathered between 2006 and 2011 and sorted in fine-grained, millisecond-by-millisecond detail. Below the 950-millisecond level, where computerized trading occurs so quickly that human traders can’t even react, no fewer than 18,520 crashes and spikes occurred...

Moreover, those events fell into patterns that didn’t fit market patterns seen at other time scales. It’s as if computerized trading has created a new world, one where the usual rules don’t apply, populated by algorithms and only dimly understood by the people who made them. The extent to which that world influences our own — perhaps making events like the 2010 flash crash more likely, or causing markets to be generally more volatile — is an open question.

"There's this whole world below 650 milliseconds. It’s like landing on another planet," said Neil Johnson, a complex systems specialist at the University of Miami...

2) Harvard has designed a micro-printed robotic "insect" using pop-up book techniques.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxSs1kGZQqc

The interesting thing about this one is that micro-printing on sheets of composite material makes it possible. The robot "assembles" by being bent out of the sheet of composite material it is "carved" from. This tech is not far out of reach of the casual bench stock hobbyist. (Seriously.)