Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. They demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair, small enough to be placed on computer chips.
The total amount of data generated worldwide is expected to reach 175 zettabytes (1 ZB equals 1 billion terabytes) by 2025. If 175 ZB were stored on Blu-ray disks, the stack would be 23 times the distance to the moon. There is an urgent need to develop storage technologies that can accommodate this enormous amount of data.
A large international team of researchers has proven that fragments of splitting atomic nuclei begin spinning after scission occurs during nuclear fission. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their experiments, which may one day fully explain why such fragments begin spinning in the first place.
The Defense Department is hungry for small drones that will track objects and fly into buildings, combat zones and other dangerous areas with little help from remote pilots. Self-piloting drones will become a key part of fighting and other military activities in the years to come, said Mike Brown, director of the Defense Innovation Unit, a Pentagon organization that aims to facilitate cooperation between the military and the tech industry.
While much has been made of tech’s unwillingness to work with the Pentagon, start-ups are still plumbing the industry’s decades-long ties to the military.
A video shared by NASA on Monday revealed the first-ever look at a spacecraft landing on Mars — and the internet was quick to take up a challenge to decode a message hidden in the parachute of the Perseverance rover.
A supercomputer presses the rewind button on the universe’s creation.
Cosmologists simulated 4000 versions of the universe in order to understand what its structure today tells us about its origins.
Colin G. Johnson, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham, recently developed a deep-learning technique that can learn a so-called “fitness function” from a set of sample solutions to a problem. This technique, presented in a paper published in Wiley’s Expert Systems journal, was initially trained to solve the Rubik’s cube, the popular 3D combination puzzle invented by Hungarian sculptor Ernő Rubik.
The Trevor Project, America’s hotline for LGBT youth, is turning to a GPT-2-powered chatbot to help troubled teenagers—but it’s setting strict limits.
A new study of x-ray bursts from a local magnetar confirms the origin of a fast radio burst.
Every now and then there is a burst of radio light in the sky. It lasts for just milliseconds before fading. It’s known as a Fast Radio Burst (FRB), and they are difficult to observe and study. We know they are powerful bursts of energy, but we aren’t entirely sure what causes them.
The more we’ve learned about FRBs, the stranger they appear. Most occur outside our galaxy, but there are a few that seem to originate within the Milky Way. Most seem to appear at random in the sky, but a few of them are repeating FRBs. Some of them even repeat with surprising regularity. Because of this, astronomers generally think they can’t be caused by a cataclysmic event, such as the last radio burst of a neutron star as it collapses into a black hole.
