The other week I was talking to someone about a math problem and he wasn't allowed to tell me the example which they'd constructed to solve it because he was in the process of applying for a patent. I remember being a little weirded out by this, I mean why should some mathematical object be patentable? The more I thought about though the more it seemed consistant with the current trend to patent things like genes. Anyway this trend went one step further when today the patent office announced that they "will consider ‘serious’ applications to patent specific integer numbers." For more details see this article.