After five years of steady progress, scientists are now edging closer and closer to mastering real-world invisibility. While researchers have already made marked strides toward making objects unseeable, much of the work was more like mimicry: Meta-materials that bent light around an object to conceal it, but only worked in two dimensions. Or a device…
Obsessive gamers’ hours at the computer have now topped scientists’ efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein. The online game Foldit allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations. Researchers have previously reported successes…
Scientists at Denmark’s Niels Bohr Institute have figured out a cool new way to lower the temperature of hot semiconductors. In a seemingly paradoxical new study, the scientists showed that light from a laser caused the temperature of semiconductor material to drop–and not by just a few degrees. The temperature fell to -269 Celsius –…
The leap second may live on for at least another three years. Once or twice a year, the leap second can be tacked on to synchronize atomic clocks — the world’s scientific timekeepers — with the Earth’s rotational cycle, which does not run quite like clockwork. Without the leap second, atomic clocks would diverge about…
The search for the perfect alliance between science and technology has married quantum computing to the future of IT – the cloud. Researchers have used quantum mechanics to encrypt heavy-duty number-crunching computing, thereby removing a major obstacle in the adoption of the cloud for many enterprises – how safe is my data when it’s hosted…
CodeHeart, a mobile application to speed diagnosis of heart attacks, has been under development in the Washington DC area for two years, but it’s still struggling to enlist emergency medical crews’ participation for a pilot project. The slow going reflects the complicated nature of mobile solutions for the health-care-provider market, which has generally taken a…
Researchers in China compared brain scans of young people with “internet addiction disorder” with their peers and found damage to the white matter fibres connecting emotional processing, attention and decision making parts. Similar impairments have been found in research into other addictions including alcohol and cocaine. This news comes after researchers at the University of…
For years, the limiting factor of increasing computational power has been how much electronic circuitry manufacturers can cram onto a single chip. Moore’s Law describes a trend that’s held true since 1971 in which CPUs have essentially doubled in capacity every 18 months, and data storage such as hard disks have generally kept up the…
Brian P. Schmidt, 2011 Nobel Physics Prize winner, discusses his SkyMapper project, which is currently scanning the southern sky in unprecedented detail and has a peak data rate of one terabyte per day. The Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, an array of 36 radio telescope dishes being built in Australia, will generate two terabytes per…
David Weinberger is one of our most incisive thinkers about the digital age, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the author of books such as Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, and the upcoming Too Big to Know. Technology editor Michael…