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I love Khan Academy's courses and app for a variety of reasons. Of all the services offering free educational courses, Khan Academy is always ahead of the curve with usability. The app has a fantastic modern look and has tens of thousands of videos, interactive examples, and more. Even if you aren't looking to learn (shame on you), give the app a try. It is especially great on iPad.

Download Khan Academy for iOS | Khan Acadmy for Android (Free)

2) WolframAlpha

You know how Google and Apple keep showing off Google Now and Siri? WolframAlpha leaves them in the dust when it comes to instant answers to various problems and questions. The amount of information delivered within the app is mind-blowing. When you're trying to learn something, you won't need to look up lots of encyclopaedias. Just ask WolframAlpha.

Download WolframAlpha for iOS | WolframAlpha for Android Rs. 190

3) Duolingo

Ever wanted to learn a new language and acted lazy about it? Remember thinking about signing up for a course and giving up? Duolingo is the best tool ever to learn a new language. It makes the experience fun and memorable with images and reminders. Once they add support for Japanese, you won't hear from me for a while.

Download Duolingo for iOS | Duolingo for Android (Free)

4) Star Walk 2

Star Walk 2 is the best app to study the stars above. No I'm not talking about horoscopes but constellations, planets, comets, and more. Star Walk 2 has an Apple Watch app as well that tells you various interesting times of the day and when it is best to view the stars. The real time gyroscope based motion tracking makes it an amazing app to use and learn. Just point your device to the sky with the app open and get ready.

Download Star Walk 2 for iOS | Star Walk 2 for Android Rs. 190

5) Coursera

Coursera as an app and a service really raises the bar for educational apps. There's something for everyone ranging from business to computer science and even gamification. It supports everything you'd expect and has some additional features like a nifty 10 second rewind feature, multiple language support for learning, offline downloads, and audio only mode. It is hard to find a single flaw with Coursera.

Download Coursera for iOS | Coursera for Android (Free)

6) iTunes U

Apple's iTunes U is a multi-purpose app. It lets you learn from tons of online universities and explore a variety of subjects and it is the one shop app needed to setup your classroom as a professor on iPad. iTunes U lets you keep track of homework, grades, and more. Apple has been doing great things in the education field for a long time. This is one of the highlights.

Download iTunes U for iOS (Free)

7) TED

The official TED app lets you view TED Talks across all subjects in multiple languages. These talks are from interesting people in every field, and the app lets you view them or download them for offline use. The app is updated regularly with content. Give it a shot today.

Download TED for iOS | TED for Android (Free)

8) Elevate - Brain Training

Just like how Duolingo changes the way you learn a language, Elevate will train your brain in ways you never could imagine. It is full of mini games and puzzle sections that test your mental strength. The app is designed well and also has an Apple Watch app if you want to train on an even smaller screen.

Download Elevate - Brain Training for iOS | Elevate - Brain Training for Android (Free)

9) Udemy

Udemy is a great service to enrol in a variety of courses. There are a few free sample courses but the bulk of the app is full of great paid courses. Instructors are consistently great with practical lessons and you can't really go wrong here. Still thinking about picking up that guitar?

Download Udemy and start strumming. Download Udemy for iOS | Udemy for Android (Free)

10) Lumosity

Just like Elevate, Lumosity aims to train you. In this case your memory and attention are called to the field. You create a custom training program suited to your needs and Lumosity games help you improve. The games are used in research and are fun as opposed to being monotonous. Lumosity also has an Apple Watch app.

Download Lumosity for iOS | Lumosity for Android (Free)

These apps are our top 10 picks for learning and education - what are your picks? Tell us via the comments.

Facebook, in a bid to gain user traction for its Messenger app, has rolled out a new feature called Photo Magic, which would let users share photos more easily than before. The app feature is currently limited to Australia and would later reach other regions. The feature would arrive in the US as well, as per Facebook messenger chief David Marcus.

Self-destructing in 3…2…1. Boom!

A new technology can make computer chips self-destruct when remotely triggered. The new method uses silicon computer wafers attached to a piece of tempered glass that shatters into smithereens when heated in one spot.

The heat can be turned on via a remote, which in the future could conceivably be triggered by anything from Wi-Fi to a radiofrequency signal, said Gregory Whiting, a materials scientist and manager of the Novel Electronics Group that produced the chip at PARC, a Xerox company. The self-destructing chip was on display last month at DARPA's "Wait, What? Technology Forum" in St. Louis. [

Tempered glass

The team was initially inspired to make self-destructing electronics that could be built with off-the-shelf products, Whiting said. The researchers considered a number of methods of destruction, from vaporization to dissolving, but "we approached this from the idea of, 'Could we take an off-the-shelf chip, if you like, and, without doing too much to it, could we make it become transient?'" Whiting told Live Science.

The team came upon the idea of tempered glass, an extra strength material also known as safety glass. Normally, people temper glass by cooling the edges: The glass exterior shrinks, putting the exterior into compression while the warmer interior maintains incredible tensile stress.

Though the glass is stronger than normal, "if you break a piece ofsafety glass, it kind of explodes, shatters explosively into little pieces," Whiting said.

Because glass is a poor temperature conductor, the heat-tempering process only works with pieces of glass that are at least 0.03 inches (1 millimeter) thick, whereas producing tiny particles requires thinner materials.

As such, the team used a different method, called ion exchange, to temper the glass. The researchers started with a thin piece of glass that was rich in sodium ions, or atoms of sodium with one electron stripped off. They then put the glass into a hot bath of potassium nitrate. Potassium ions then try to swap places with the sodium ions, but because the heftier potassium ions must squeeze into place within thesilicon matrix, this creates enormous tension in the glass, Whiting said.

The new method allows people to either attach silicon wafers directly to the glass, or fabricate the two together. (The final chip looks like a piece of glass with some metal lines drawn all over it.)

To induce chip suicide, the team triggers the chip with a tiny heating element, which causes a thermal shock that creates a fracture that spreads throughout the glass. The current demonstration uses a piece of glass that is 250 micrometers thick, but theoretically, any size glass could be used, Whiting said. (For comparison, an average strand of human hair is about 80 to 100 micrometers thick.)

In addition, anything from Wi-Fi to radio waves could send the kill signal to the chip, Whiting said.

Remote destruction

Of course, many might wonder: Why not take the old-fashioned route and take a sledgehammer to the electronic device?

"You can throw your phone into some boiling water, or you can smash it on the floor, you can even apply a high-current pulse to try and burn up the memory," Whiting said.

But even though all those methods may be more low-tech (and potentially more therapeutic) than a self-destructing computer chip, they can't be implemented from afar.

And, barring using an acid to dissolve the object, it's actually pretty hard to completely destroy information on an electronic device using most methods, Whiting said.

"People are pretty strongly able to recover that information, becausethe bits are still in order," Whiting said, referring to the base unit of information on a silicon chip.

By contrast, the self-destructing glass chip shatters into such tiny pieces that the method "doesn't just wipe the data, it sort of rearranges the bits," Whiting said. Some of the debris is so tiny that it destroys many of the bits altogether. Reconstructing the data would require putting all those tiny particles back together, he added.