23andMe has reached a deal with pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline, giving the company access to their (your) genetic data to potentially develop new drugs. Did they just sell us all out? Not exactly.

Multitasking is a great skill, especially if you can do it without compromising on the quality of your work. However, new research suggests that juggling too many things at once could be detrimental to your "cognitive domains", especially if you're a "heavy" multitasker.

How often do you take your allotted lunch break? If you're anything like the 1253 Australian workers surveyed by recruitment agency Hays, the vast majority of you don't. And that's despite most of the people agreeing that not taking a break was bad for productivity.

More than four of every five consumers say the experience they get from businesses over digital channels aren't good enough according to recent research by Gartner. Looking at number of different uses cases such as placing a retail order, submitting a service request or paying a government bill, the study evaluated perceived ease of use and benefits received such as saving time or money. While many companies think they're doing OK on digital service delivery, that's not what their customers are saying.

We've learned to be highly suspicious that the GPS, camera and microphone in our smartphones can be used to track our every move, listen into our conversations and watch our most intimate moments. But what about the act of tapping and swiping our screens? Can that be used by a bad actor? Researchers from CSIRO's Data 61 have found just that.

Have you ever felt stuck when you have something half written? Maybe it’s a school paper, or a short story, or... an article about life hacks. A tool called JSTOR Analyser can read your draft and suggest new things for you to read, making it a genius way to procrastinate.

About half the time I go to look at a piece of research I read about in a news article, the actual research is trapped behind a paywall.

Chrome: When I was in university, my least favourite part of writing research papers was figuring out how to write the bibliography. Citing sources is tedious and can get confusing if you have to work in a handful of different styles. This week I came across a Chrome extension that I wish I had in university that handles the heavy lifting for you, at least for websites.

Who do you tell your deepest, darkest secrets to and why?

In high school, I only remember scrawling names of crushes on my pencil case and, as an adult, I feel like I'm pretty considered with the information I want to keep to myself - but I do know a few of my friends curliest tales. Now I know why - new research shows the kind of personality traits you need to get people to tell you their secrets.

Every time I go on holiday, I'm surrounded by people taking phone pics. But I only recently realised that this holiday annoyance could be useful: Before you book a hotel, campground, restaurant table or museum tickets, look up the place on Instagram. Not the place's official account, but all the photos taken at that location. (Just run a search within Instagram and click the result with the map pin icon.)

Okay, that headline is a complete fabrication. A lie. Some people will read it and be delighted or disgusted, even sharing it on social media without realising I am making all this up.

So, Today I (actually) Discovered just how instrumental Twitter has become in spreading fake news, thanks to new research out of MIT.

Wikipedia is great at laying out the cold, hard facts about things, but it often reads as if a computer wrote it. It can be hard to get the "vibe" of a subject. Instead, try TV Tropes. While this specialised wiki mostly focuses on entertainment like movies and TV shows and video games, it also collects "useful notes" about real-world people, places and phenomena.

In Australia, we have to deal with a vast array of animals that can kill us - snakes, spiders, angry roos and cassowaries. We've learnt to live with this. But are we prepared for the fact that Australian birds are using fire to catch and eat their prey? I don't think we are.

A 2014 article from The Atlantic is making the rounds again, fuelled by an inflammatory headline. It's a pretty straightforward write-up of the research, but the headline is driving angry shares from the way it puts the blame on women.

I have to admit to a little bit of self-interest in this story, as someone I love has Type 1 diabetes (it used to be called Juvenile Diabetes). The Juvenile Diabetes Reseach Foundation (JDRF) and IBM have commenced a new collaboration to apply machine learning in order to identify the factors leading to the onset to this autoimmune disease.

A year ago, the federal government seemingly gutted science and technology research in this country, to the great consternation of many. But from the ashes of NICTA and CSIRO's Digital Productivity group came Data61. The agency's purpose is to bring together federal and state government departments, industry, university partners and CSIRO-wide capability to foster an ecosystem of innovation and collaboration. And while that sounds like it comes from a marketing brochure, the agency has made great strides in a number of fields and engaged with the public in ways that were rarely seen just a year ago.

An article at MIT Technology Review says some early work at Microsoft Research is looking at how to encode documents in DNA. The aim is to have some sort of working model by the end of this decade, with the tagline "Your Storage with DNA" being bandied about.

Scarcely a day passes when I don't receive a report from some analyst or research organisation informing me of how a new product has saved a bunch of companies a massive sum of money, or how a product has been identified as a leader or innovator in their chosen market niche. But can we trust these reports?

A study by researchers from Data61/CSIRO, UC Berkeley, UNSW Sydney and UCSI finds that several popular VPN services on Android open up a variety of security holes, including injecting JavaScript for ads and tracking services and traffic redirection to commerce sites.