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Spectroscopy, a key method of identifying atoms and molecules with light, has been taken to its most fundamental level - a single photon absorbed by a single molecule. In addition to paving the way toward new experiments that observe the interaction between light and matter at its most basic level, the researchers that accomplished the feat suggest that their technique could also work with other photon-emitters, including those under study for quantum communication.Spectroscopy works by finding the frequencies of light that will put an atom or molecule into an excited state - these comprise the chemical's unique absorption and emission...

General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright. But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself. In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs...

Artist’s impression of the quantum photonic chip, showing the waveguide circuit (in white), and the voltage-controlled phase shifters (metal contacts on the surface). Photon pairs become entangled as they pass through the circuit. The fundamental resource that drives a quantum computer is entanglement—the connection between two distant particles which Einstein famously called 'spooky action at a distance'. The Bristol researchers have, for the first time, shown that this remarkable phenomenon can be generated, manipulated and measured entirely on a tiny silica chip. They have also used the same chip to measure mixture—an often unwanted effect from the environment, but...

Vol. 330 no. 6011 pp. 1612-1613 DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6011.1612 News IntroductionTen years ago, Karl Deisseroth was stuck. A psychiatrist and neuroscientist, he wanted to learn how different brain circuits affect behavior—and what went awry in the brains of his patients with schizophrenia and depression. But the tools of his trade were too crude: Electrodes inserted into the brain would stimulate too many cells in their vicinity. So in 2004, Deisseroth and his students invented a new tool. They inserted a gene for a light-activated algal protein into mice brains, where it entered nerve cells. By stimulating those cells with a laser,...

A new photonic chip that works on light rather than electricity has been built by an international research team, paving the way for the production of ultra-fast quantum computers with capabilities far beyond today’s devices. Future quantum computers will, for example, be able to pull important information out of the biggest databases almost instantaneously. As the amount of electronic data stored worldwide grows exponentially, the technology will make it easier for people to search with precision for what they want. EDITOR’S CHOICE Making sense of a ‘nonsensical world’ - Sep-16 Fears over computers’ impact on lives - Sep-14 Brain scan...

Help wanted: business application archaeologists… Teaching mainframe skills is out of vogue at many universities with the advent of newer approaches to solving the biggest computing challenges. At the same time, many of the engineers capable of tinkering with the refrigerator-sized machines are nearing retirement. The average age of mainframe workers is 55 to 60, according to Dayton Semerjian, a senior vice-president at CA Technologies (CA), the second-largest maker of software for mainframe computers after IBM. "The big challenge with the mainframe is that the group that has worked on it—the Baby Boomers—is retiring," Semerjian says. "The demographics are inescapable....

Computer scientists at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., are asking industry for novel technologies and approaches that offer dramatic advances in high-performance military computer performance, and enable so-called extreme scale computing -- the notion of exceeding today's peta-scale computing to achieve one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. DARPA released a broad agency announcement Monday (DARPA-BAA-10-78) for the Omnipresent High Performance Computing (OHPC) program to help develop tomorrow's high-performance computers to meet the relentlessly increasing demands for greater performance, higher energy efficiency, ease of programmability, dependability, and security in aerospace and defense computing for military...

here is a fervent debate going on in the open source community about cloud computing. Will the cloud kill open source? [2] Will multi-tenancy services make cloud providers need to hide the source, as a recent Forbes article [3] suggests? I recently went to the best expert I could find on the matter to ask: Marten Mickos [4]. Mickos is the CEO of "private cloud" software (aka virtualization) maker Eucalyptus Systems [5]. He earned himself Open Source Hall of Fame status as the charismatic former CEO of MySQL. Mickos was adamant that open source not only won't kill the cloud,...

Satellite systems in space keyed to detect nuclear events and environmental gasses currently face a kind of data logjam because their increasingly powerful sensors produce more information than their available bandwidth can easily transmit. Experiments conducted by Sandia National Laboratories at the International Space Station preliminarily indicate that the problem could be remedied by orbiting more complex computer chips to pre-reduce the large data stream. While increased satellite on-board computing capabilities ideally would mean that only the most useful information would be transmitted to Earth, an unresolved question had been how well the latest in computing electronics would fare in...

OpenOffice 3.2 is available for download. Improvements in the latest release of the open source office suite include faster start-ups, improved compatibility with other office programs, and several new features (with special attention to the Calc spreadsheet program.) At the same time, the OpenOffice.org team is celebrating its tenth anniversary and a claimed total 300 million downloads of the office software since its initial launch. They say that just over a year since its launch, OpenOffice 3 has logged over one third of those downloads from the central server alone. (Thanks in a large part to Germans, Czechs, and Poles,...

The military is a major user of supercomputers (the fastest computers on the planet). These machines were first developed, as were the first computers, for military applications. These ultra-powerful computers are used for code breaking, and to help design weapons (including nukes) and equipment (especially electronics). The military is also needs lots of computing power for data mining (pulling useful information, about the enemy, from ever larger masses of information.) Because there's never enough money to buy all the super-computers (which are super expensive) needed, military researchers have come up with ways to do it cheaper. A decade ago, it...

Robert Charette // Fri, August 07, 2009 The London Daily Mail published a long, interesting and disturbing story yesterday about the ease with which security experts were able to hack the supposedly "unforgeable" new UK ID card for foreign nationals and change the data within the embedded microchip within minutes. Given that the hacked ID card uses the same technology as is to be used in National ID cards for UK residents in the next few years, the implications are obvious. The Daily Mail says that when the UK government was told of its findings, the government dismissed them, saying,...

IBM plans to announce on Tuesday that it will supply the world's fastest supercomputer to the U.S. Department of Energy in the next few years, according to numerous reports. Not only will the machine, called Sequoia, be the fastest supercomputer to date, it will blow the current record-holder out of the water. IBM's Roadrunner, located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, was the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (a petaflop is equal to a quadrillion calculations per second; the "flops" stands for floating point operations per second). But only seven months after the Roadrunner took...

Terascale still moving forward With our time at IDF quickly drawing to a close, we are in the final stretch of content from the show.  While I didn’t get to the keynotes on the morning on mobility, we have the general basis of their contents here as well as some other interesting topics like terascale processors and Intel’s upcoming Extreme .Terascale Computing UpdateLast year at IDF Intel first started to demonstrate and discuss their terascale computing research project that featured a that was a dramatic shift from anything Intel had done in the past.  The was built out of 80...

The ongoing tussle between Intel and AMD has dominated the news in recent weeks, but there's another potential battleground shaping up for Intel that could have a huge impact on personal computing. A major topic I want to cover over the next several months is the looming showdown as the smart phone industry tries to develop more powerful computers, and the PC industry tries to build smaller and smaller computers. This week has provided a decent glimpse of Intel's vision of where it thinks the industry needs to go with its Silverthorne processor, designed for a new concept of computer...

GRID.ORG said it's finished gridding and stopped doing research on critical health research. It doesn't say why it's boldly stopped gridding apart from saying it's completed its mission to boldly demonstrate the benefits of large scale Internet based grid computing. It suggests how to uninstall your grid agent, here. One reader said: "I had 10 years & 28 days of accumulated participation since February 2002 beginning with a K6-2-450MHz and ending with a dual Xeon 3.6 GHz XP-Pro rig." Surely there's more that can be done?

Twenty years before most scientists expected it, a commercial company has announceda quantum computer that promises to massively speed up searches and optimisation calculations. D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, that can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel "universes"), thanks to a new technique which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing. But the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach. D-Wave is the world's only "commercial" quantum computing company, backed by more than $20 million of venture capital (there are more commercial ventures in the related field of quantum cryptography). Its...

An individual "dopant" atom has been spied interfering with the flow of electrons through a silicon transistor for the first time. Researchers say the feat could help scientists squeeze more power out of conventional computers and ultimately develop silicon-based quantum computers. Dopants are chemical impurities that affect the flow of electrons through a conducting or semiconducting material. They are deliberately added to pure silicon, for example, to create different types of electronic component. To analyse a lone dopant atom in action, Sven Rogge and colleagues at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands cryogenically cooled 35-nanometre-wide silicon wires, taken from...

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 21 — The Pentagon awarded almost $500 million in contracts to I.B.M. and Cray Inc. on Tuesday to design a supercomputer several times as fast as today’s most powerful systems. The Cray contract is for $250 million and the I.B.M. contract is for $244 million, to be spent during the next four years. They prevailed over Sun Microsystems.The contracts are part of the High Productivity Computing Systems program being led by the Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. The program aims to achieve and surpass the ability to calculate more than a...

The Royal Society (RS) announced yesterday that we may all know a lot less about a lot more than we ever thought we did as humans. A total of 1.5 million pages and 250,000 trillion articles will be available electronically to technologists. A new joint study by the Royal Society in Halifax, the California Polytechnical Institute, and the University of Pittsburgh in New Brunswick has found that people who have been publicly educated using high technology are likely to be twice as not as they are smart. This backs up several soon to be conducted prior studies which disclose disturbing...

Stanford researchers' new etching method shows promise for bulk manufacturing of nanotube-electronics. Semiconducting carbon nanotubes could be the centerpiece of low-power, ultra-fast electronics of the future. The challenge is getting them to work with today's manufacturing processes. Now researchers at Stanford University have made an important advance toward large-scale nanotube electronics. They have created functional transistors using an etching process that can be integrated with the methods used to carve out silicon-based computer chips. A major roadblock to making carbon-nanotube transistors has been the difficulty of separating semiconducting tubes from a typical batch of nanotubes, in which about a third...

HAL may soon be getting some company. But unlike the famous computer companion in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the first space-based supercomputer — so described because it will be by far the most powerful computer in space — is already nearing reality. Engineering researchers at the University of Florida and Honeywell Aerospace are designing and building the computer projected to operate as much as 100 times faster than any computer in space today. Expected to be launched aboard a NASA rocket on a test mission in 2009, the computer is needed to process rapidly increasing amounts of data...

Even if quantum computers can be made to work, there will still be two big obstacles preventing quantum networks becoming a reality. First, quantum bits, or qubits, stored in matter will have to be transferred to photons to be transmitted over long distances. Secondly, errors that creep in during transmission have to be corrected. Two unrelated studies have now shown how to clear these hurdles. Both studies use quantum entanglement, a spooky property that links particles however far apart they are. Measuring a quantum property on one particle immediately affects the other, and this effect can be used to “teleport”...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1,020 active CPUs - 70,500 completed Work Units and 12.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

Intel Terascale Brings 80 Cores To Your DesktopIf you were impressed with dual core technology and quad core processors seem a bit like overkill, how about Terascale processing with 80 cores? Sound far fetched? Intel doesn’t think so. Head on over to PCPerspective for the rest of the article. For our discussions here, the term “terascale” will refer to a processor with 32 or more cores. Moving away from the “large” cores seen in the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 lines from Intel and AMD, the cores in a terascale processor will be much simpler (kind of like we...

Computer designers at the University of Rochester are going ballistic. "Everyone has been trying to make better transistors by modifying current designs, but what we really need is the next paradigm," says Quentin Diduck, a graduate student at the University who thought up the radical new design. "We've gone from the relay, to the tube, to semiconductor physics. Now we're taking the next step on the evolutionary track." That next step goes by the imposing name of "Ballistic Deflection Transistor," and it's as far from traditional transistors as tubes. Instead of running electrons through a transistor as if they were...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1009 active CPUs - 55,700 completed Work Units and 9.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

Tokyo, Japan, Jul 18, 2006 (JCN Newswire via COMTEX) -- IBM Japan in collaboration with Connect Technology has developed an electronic clipping system, which uses invisible 2D barcodes printed on paper to integrate information from paper and digital data such as information provided on Internet sites. The new system adds an invisible digital layer to printed materials, enabling the printed materials to be used like a portable site. Invisible 2D barcodes which store digital data are printed on paper using invisible ink. The barcodes are then extracted from the paper by an image processing application. Since invisible ink is...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 351 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 85th place (with 908 active CPUs - 47,400 completed Work Units and nearly 8.5 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 342 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 99th place (with 985 active CPUs - 39,500 completed Work Units and nearly 7 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 337 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 103th place (with 988 active CPUs - 36,400 completed Work Units and more than 6,4 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 325+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 108th place (with 991 active CPUs - 34,150 completed Work Units and more than 6,000,000 points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 117th place (with 1,038 active CPUs - 29,000 completed Work Units and more than 5,000,000 points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Maxtor has taken charge in the land of personal backup for quite some time now and shows no signs of slowing down and letting its competition gain ground with its not too distant release of the One-Touch III drive that has a total of 1 Terabyte on tap. It wasn’t long ago that 1 Terabyte of storage would be limited to the ultra-rich or businesses whose need for large amounts of data could justify it. To that point, Maxtor has found a way to bring this huge amount of storage in a price tag of well under $800 dollars. While...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 144th place (with 1,045 CPUs - 24,200 completed Work Units and nearly 4,000,000 points) This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 164th place (with 992 CPUs - nearly 19,000 completed Work Units and 2,982,241 points) This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see...

The M4 Project began in early January, as an attempt to break three original Enigma messages that were intercepted in 1942 and are thought never to have been broken by the Allied forces. These messages were encrypted using a four-rotor Enigma. That version was considered by Germany to be completely unbreakable, as it could be set up in any one of a vast number of ways (2 times 10 to the 145th power), each of which would encrypt a plain text message differently.

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 250+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 188th place (with 940 CPUs - 15,725 completed Work Units and 2,330,000 points) This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see the...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's 250+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 204th place, having reached more than 2,000,000 points! This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Welcome to the new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. The previous thread has gotten too large, so we move on to yet another. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's 250+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 241st place, having moved up from 1200th...

 AUSSIE MICROSOFT CALENDAR MESS The Commonwealth Games are coming to Melbourne in March this year http://www.melbourne2006.com.au/ and normally that would not matter to us except that it's going to cause a major upheaval for users of Microsoft Office, Exchange and Windows.  It'll mostly affect our Aussie friends but also anyone who deals with the Great Southern Land. The problem is also a sharp indictment of Microsoft's spotty support for changing time zones.  Changes in daylight savings arrangements do happen so paying customers of Windows and Office are entitled to expect more elegant technologies to deal with this real world situation.  ...

Welcome to the folding at home thread. The previous thread has gotten too large, so we move on to yet another. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's members, or it's founders, it is comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing, who have banded together, to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via Distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimers, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 777th place,...

OK, new thread to celebrate reaching a major milestone! Within a few hours Team FreeRepublic will be in the Top1000!!!! We should pass Dean for America, around noon tommorrow. Other liberal teams want to challenge us (DUmmies and Kos) but we're humiliating them beyond description.

Apologies if this is cross posted on the wrong board... While surfing around yesterday, I saw this post... http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1547014/posts?page=1,50 I got to thinking, which was a big mistake cause it started me crying. You see, I've lost more than 7 family members to Cancer...the most recent was my sweet Niece. She was only 31 and left behind 2 awesome little boys, and devastated my Sister, as well. I have friends that have lost loved ones too, and some that are still living in fear of the day that the test comes back with bad old news...again. Smile is a friend...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 104 processors and 76 users. We have a number of new users in the team, with Clara Lou, fzx12345, SamfromLivingston, brityank, manwiththehands and Tami all popping onto the hit list this week. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. Malsua is continuing to add systems and now accounts for 10% of the FR total. Great...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 65 processors. ArgentCent is the latest to have joined our happy band of folders and jumps in at # 36 with his first completed WU. We now have 51 members in the team, and about 45 active participants. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. One of these will probably be the new Numero Uno...

FreeRepublic Team Ranked #1,550 (of 41,708 teams)

For the first time in years, hardware startups are trying to break into the market. Their gambit: Inexpensive special-purpose machinesSPECIAL REPORT: NEXT-GENERATION COMPUTERS>> Steve Dewitt remembers an incident that occurred soon after he joined startup Azul Systems three years ago. He walked out to the driveway of his Silicon Valley home to pick up the morning newspaper and ran into a neighbor -- Bob Evans, a legendary former IBM (IBM) executive who oversaw the development of the mainframe computer in the 1960s that led to Big Blue's industry dominance. Dewitt had recently told Evans of Azul's plan to create a...

FR Team ranking up to number 1782 of 41608

Folding@Home update: 3 Work Units completed, 2 computers, 138 points, overall team rank #15,162