The idea was that children could use special Lego components to build their own experimental instruments, which would work as MIDI controllers.

ENGADGET: Music Thing: Musical instruments made of Lego

They have pointed, for example, to attempts in the past year or so to buy thousands of special-purpose aluminium tubes, allegedly components for centrifuges to enrich uranium into a weapons-grade material.

ECONOMIST: A difficult struggle of uncertain duration | The

Optical correlators, meanwhile, work by encoding images on to a beam of light and, using a special lens, transforming them into their Fourier components building-blocks that encode the thickness and direction of lines in the image, but not their position.

ECONOMIST: Optical recognition