Photo: Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics
Source: IEEE.ORG
4 May 2010—Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, led by Gerhard Rempe, have created a system based on a single atom that they’re calling a ”quantum optical transistor.” The transistor could someday serve as part of a quantum computer or as a node of a quantum data network.
”We’re doing what people in the Bell Laboratories did in the 1950s,” says Eden Figueroa, one of the physicists involved in the project. ”They were inventing the transistor, and people thought they were crazy. But 50 years later, everyone is using a laptop.” Now, he says, ”we’re inventing the quantum transistor that may be used in computers 30 years from now.”
Their process relies on a complex light manipulation technique called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). In EIT, one beam of light controls the properties of another, much as the gate voltage controls current through a regular transistor. The researchers demonstrated EIT through the mediation of a single atom, which is a first; previously the technique was applied to hundreds of thousands of atoms in a gas.
Read more…
Internet, Sci/tech, Technology
Internet, Sci/tech, Technology
Windows 7 packages sold at a rate of three per minute during a special midnight opening of an electrical store to mark the launch.
More than 500 people queued outside PC World in central London to be the first to get a copy when the store opened at midnight on October 21.
The DSGi group, which includes Currys, Dixons and PC World, reported a huge surge in trade throughout the morning.
“Within an hour we were up 180% on sales,” said a spokesperson.
The figure was set against a standard day of Vista sales.
DSGi’s top selling upgrade was the home premium family pack, which contains licences for up to three users. Read more…
Technology
Technology
A Pentagon-sponsored project to control flying insects remotely has sent ripples of excitement across the scientific pond.
Part insect, part machine, the “cyborg beetle” has been tested successfully by its developers at the University of California, Berkeley.
Video footage shows a beetle being “flown” around a room by a man using a laptop.
At one point it is tethered to a transparent plastic plate, and its tiny limbs can be seen twitching in response to the operator’s joy stick.
The developers, Michel Maharbiz and Hirotaka Sato, “demonstrated the remote control of insects in free flight via an implantable radio-equipped miniature neural stimulating system”, they told the current edition of Frontiers in Neuroscience magazine.
Noel Sharkey, professor of robotics and artificial intelligence at the UK’s Sheffield University, says that while attempts to control insects such as cockroaches are not new, this is the first time man has managed to remotely control a flying insect.
What intrigues him is the Berkeley project’s ultimate military application. Read more…
Biotech, Sci/tech, Technology
Biotech, Sci/tech, Technology
from: OttawaSitizen.com
OTTAWA — Google has activated its controversial Street View service in Canada, providing address-by-address photographic views of Ottawa and at least 10 other cities.
The service, already available in the U.S. and other countries, is certain to do two things:
1. Send everyone with a computer to the Google site to look up their homes and other addresses of interest; Read more…
Internet, Technology
Internet, Technology
By Priya Ganapati
From: Wired.Com
TV manufacturers want to bring that experience to your living room with 3-D displays that work much like the ones in the theaters. Major consumer-electronics companies, including Panasonic, Mitsubishi and Sony, are betting on 3-D, with compatible TV sets planned for the market in 2010.
To understand why, here’s a short primer on how our vision works. Our eyes are about 3 inches apart, which means each eye sees a slightly different perspective of the same scene. The brain takes images from both eyes, fuses them together and uses the difference between the images to calculate distance, creating a sense of depth.
Getting the 3-D effect at home involves tricking the brain into doing something similar with the images that it gets from a TV set. But that’s not a trivial problem: TV makers have to figure out a way to precisely show a set of slightly different images to each of your eyes.
So how do they do that? Here are the key technologies that are making their way into 3-D TVs.
Home audio video, Technology
Home audio video, Technology
Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader is going on sale in more than 100 countries around the world, including the UK.
The reader has been confined to the US since its launch in November 2007; Amazon expects to have sold a million of the devices by the end of the year.
The global version will run on the 3G network, although Amazon has not specified the networks that will provide connectivity for the devices.
The Kindle store will offer over 200,000 English language titles.
Hundreds of publishers are signed up including Penguin, Faber and Faber, and HarperCollins.
It will also carry more than 85 US and international newspapers and magazines.
Internet, Technology, netbooks, wired
netbooks, Technology, wired
