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Magnetic levitation keyboards have been around for a while, but they’ve never really taken off, or floated our boats, or attracted much atten… Anyway, a Taiwanese manufacturer called Darfon is persevering with the idea, and it’s discovered that maglev keys, which rest on opposing magnets instead of mushy membranes or mechanical switches, can make laptop keyboards significantly thinner. Unfortunately, according to a CNET journalist who played with a couple of prototypes at Computex, the keys can be hard to type on if skinniness is taken to the extreme. Then again, there’s scope to change the resistance of the keyboard electronically to suit your preference, and Darfon claims it has already received orders from laptop makers who are targeting launches later this year. If that’s true, perhaps the technology isn’t so repellant after all.

[Image credit: Aloysius Low / CNET].

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Tunneling, a key feature of quantum mechanics, is when a particle that encounters a seemingly insurmountable barrier passes through it, ending up on the other side. A series of experiments carried out by physicists from Griffith University, Lanzhou University, the Australian National University, Drake University and Korea’s Institute for Basic Science has definitively determined the tunneling delay, which is also the time it takes for an electron to get out or ionize from a hydrogen atom.

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DENVER — Researchers have developed a new, unspeakably dangerous, and incredibly slow method of crossing the universe. It involves wormholes linking special black holes that probably don’t exist. And it might explain what’s really going on when physicists quantum-teleport information from one point to another — from the perspective of the teleported bit of information.

Daniel Jafferis, a Harvard University physicist, described the proposed method at a talk April 13 here at a meeting of the American Physical Society. This method, he told his assembled colleagues, involves two black holes that are entangled so that they are connected across space and time.

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