First it was toggle switches. And then keyboards, the mouse and other standard interface devices gave us control of computers and the digital world. From the tangible, to hands-free and beyond, the ways in which we control digital systems are expanding. We’ve collected just a few of the interesting products and concepts that are breaching the two-dimensional world of computing and merging it with our physical reality.
[Image: Jinha Lee / MIT Media Lab].
The Swedish government announced this week that they will be spending an extra US$546 million on renewable energy and climate change action in their 2016 budget, with the aim of becoming one of the world’s first nations to end its dependence on fossil fuels. They haven’t set a deadline for this ambitious goal just yet, but last year the country announced plans to make its capital Stockholm fossil fuel-free by 2050, so we’re imagining a similar time frame.
It may seem like a pretty big task, but the Scandinavian country already gets two-thirds of its electricity from non-fossil fuel energy sources — predominately hydroelectric and nuclear — and it will now be focussing on increasing its solar and wind energy potential, as well as making its transport industry more sustainable. The majority of the budget increase will be financed by heavier taxes on petrol and diesel fuel.
“Sweden will become one of the first fossil-free welfare states in the world,” Prime Minister Stefan Löfven told the press. “When European regulations do not go far enough Sweden will lead the way.”
IPFS isn’t exactly a well-known technology yet, even among many in the Valley, but it’s quickly spreading by word of mouth among folks in the open-source community. Many are excited by its potential to greatly improve file transfer and streaming speeds across the Internet.
From my personal perspective, however, it’s actually much more important than that. IPFS eliminates the need for websites to have a central origin server, making it perhaps our best chance to entirely re-architect the Internet — before its own internal contradictions unravel it from within.
How, and why? The answer requires a bit of background.
Caption: Tensor networks could connect space-time froth to quantum information. Hannes Hummel for Quanta Magazine.
“Dr Brouchkov, the head of the Geocryology Department at Moscow State University, first injected himself with the bacteria two years ago.
He claims he has not had flu since, and that he has also been able to work harder and longer without getting tired.”
A RUSSIAN scientist claims he has cracked the secret of ETERNAL LIFE after injecting himself with primordial GERMS.
What are the properties of the vacuum, the absolute nothingness? So far, physicists have assumed that it is impossible to directly access the characteristics of the ground state of empty space. Now, a team of physicists led by Prof. Alfred Leitenstorfer at the University of Konstanz (Germany) has succeeded in doing just that. They demonstrated a first direct observation of the so-called vacuum fluctuations by using short light pulses while employing highly precise optical measurement techniques. The duration of their light pulses was ensured to be shorter than half a cycle of light in the spectral range investigated. According to quantum physics, these oscillations exist even in total darkness, when the intensity of light and radio waves completely disappears. These findings are of fundamental importance for the development of quantum physics and will be published in the journal Science; an advance online version has appeared on October 1, 2015.
The existence of vacuum fluctuations is already known from theory as it follows from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one of the main pillars of quantum physics. This principle dictates that electric and magnetic fields can never vanish simultaneously. As a consequence, even total darkness is filled with finite fluctuations of the electromagnetic field, representing the quantum ground state of light and radio waves. However, until now direct experimental proof of this basic phenomenon has been considered impossible. Instead, it is usually assumed that vacuum fluctuations are manifested in nature only indirectly. From spontaneous emission of light by excited atoms e.g. in a fluorescent tube to influences on the structure of the universe during the Big Bang: these are just some of the instances that highlight the ubiquitous role the concept of vacuum fluctuations plays in the modern physical description of the world.
An experimental setup to measure electric fields with extremely high temporal resolution and sensitivity has now made it possible to directly detect vacuum fluctuations, despite all contrary assumptions. World-leading optical technologies and ultrashort pulsed laser systems of extreme stability provide the know-how necessary for this study. The research team at the University of Konstanz developed these technologies in-house and also an exact description of the results based on quantum field theory. The temporal precision achieved in their experiment is in the femtosecond range — a millionth of a billionth of a second. The sensitivity is limited only by the principles of quantum physics. “This extreme precision has enabled us to see for the first time that we are continuously surrounded by the fields of electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations” sums up Alfred Leitenstorfer.
The heat-death of the universe need not bring an end to the computing age. A strange device known as a time crystal can theoretically continue to work as a computer even after the universe cools. A new blueprint for such a time crystal brings its construction a step closer.
Ordinary crystals are three-dimensional objects whose atoms are arranged in regular, repeating patterns – just like table salt. They adopt this structure because it uses the lowest amount of energy possible to maintain.
Earlier this year, Frank Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speculated that a similar structure might repeat regularly in the fourth dimension – time.
Injecting yourself with a bacterium that’s 3.5 million years old is either the dumbest thing a person could do, or it’s brilliant. But that is exactly what a Russian scientist has done, in a quest to see if Bacillus F has the answer to eternal life.
