Matt Webb is on holiday, but his outboard brain is not. There he’s sneak-previewing what he thinks is going to be his next big topic of enquiry: the sufficiently-broad “what’s next”

On which note, this piece from a recent New Scientist on who might be next at the top of the food chain caught my eye:

“As smart colonies of super-insects evolve rapidly, the once mighty mammals are driven by competitive onslaught to near extinction. Within a few million years these super-coordinated colonies achieve a tactile and chemical language with a syntax and grammar. Their computational networks discover mathematical complexities far beyond the point reached by humans. Space travel is for amateurs; quantum computing opens the portals to galactic exploration. Think about that next time you swat a wasp.”

» NewScientist.com: An alien intelligence [may require registration?]