Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Boosting up microprocessors -the heart of modern computers- at the speed of light, reducing consumptions and costs, may now be a reality thanks to the development of a new high-performance chip, the results of which have been published in Nature Photonics.

There's a certain homespun charm to the animated .gif. The beauty lies in the simplicity of these animations: It's easy to make one, and .gifs are far faster to upload, stream, or send than a video file. For the uninitiated, a .gif is simply a looped set of static images, a kind of digital flipbook

Physicists from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) have demonstrated a new technique to control the speed and direction of light using memory metamaterials whose properties can be repeatedly changed.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Hong Kong physicists say they have proved that a single photon obeys Einstein's theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light -- demonstrating that outside science fiction, time travel is impossible.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the University of Glasgow have, for the first time, been able to drag light by slowing it down to the speed of sound and sending it through a rotating crystal.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, c, is one of the most fundamental laws of nature. But since this speed limit has only been experimentally demonstrated for information carried by large groups of photons, physicists have recently speculated as to whether single photons and the information carried by them may be able to exceed the speed of light. In a new study, physicists have performed the difficult task of producing single photons with controllable waveforms, and have shown that single photons also obey the speed limit c.

By Marian Turner of Nature magazine Bats use tiny hairs to sense the speed and direction of air flowing over their wings.

Last year word broke of a computer virus that had managed to slip into Iran’s highly secure nuclear enrichment facilities. Most viruses multiply without prejudice, but the Stuxnet virus had a specific target in its sights--one that is not connected to the Internet. Stuxnet was planted on a USB stick that was handed to an unsuspecting technician, who plugged it into a computer at a secure facility

(PhysOrg.com) -- A group of physicists working out of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have succeeded in proving what was until now, just theory; and that is, that visible photons could be produced from the virtual particles that have been thought to exist in a quantum vacuum. In a paper published on arXiv, the team describes how they used a specially created circuit called a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) to modulate a bit of wire length at a roughly five percent of the speed of light, to produce visible "sparks" from the nothingness of a vacuum.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A Swinburne University professor was part of a team that showed that drag on hot bodies moving through liquid can be radically reduced by up to 85 per cent, potentially doubling their speed.

When Air France Flight 447 disappeared in June 2009, it was in the middle of the tropical Atlantic and had likely entered a mesoscale convective complex , a system of strong thunderstorms thought to have been at least four storms deep along 447's flight path. Flight 447 was also flying at a cruise altitude of 35,000 feet, an altitude where the relationship between an aircraft's stall speed and the speed of sound has gained the name "the coffin corner"

Why was Japan's March 11 earthquake so big? One answer is the large size of the fault rupture as well as the speed at which the Pacific Plate is continuously thrusting beneath Japan, U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) scientist Tom Brocher told KQED News.