By creating diamond-based nanowire devices, a team at Harvard has taken another step towards making applications based on quantum science and technology possible. The new device offers a bright, stable source of single photons at room temperature, an essential element in making fast and secure computing with light practical.

Home Computers Around the World Unite to Map the Milky Way

Enthusiastic and inquisitive volunteers from Africa to Australia are donating the computing power of everything from decade-old desktops to sleek new netbooks to help computer scientists and astronomers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute map the shape of our Milky Way galaxy. Now, just this month, the collected computing power of these humble home computers has surpassed one petaflop, a computing speed that surpasses the world's second fastest supercomputer.The project, MilkyWay@Home, uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, which is widely known for the SETI@home project used to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. Today, MilkyWay@Home has outgrown even this famous project, in terms of speed, making it the fastest computing project on the BOINC platform and perhaps the second fastest public distributed computing program ever in operation (just behind Folding@home).

At this very moment, tens of thousands of home computers around the world are quietly working together to solve the largest and most basic mysteries of our galaxy. Volunteers from Africa to Australia are donating their computing power to help researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute map the shape of our Milky Way galaxy. Now, just this month, the collected computing power of these humble home computers has surpassed one petaflop, a computing speed that surpasses the world's second fastest supercomputer.

Princeton University's Jason Petta has demonstrated a method that alters the properties of a lone electron without disturbing the trillions of electrons in its immediate surroundings. The feat is essential to the development of future varieties of superfast computers with near-limitless capacities for data.

Petta, an assistant professor of physics, has fashioned a new method of trapping one or two electrons in microscopic corrals created by applying voltages to minuscule electrodes. Writing in the Feb. 5 edition of Science, he describes how electrons trapped in these corrals form "spin qubits," quantum versions of classic computer information units known as bits.

Princeton University's Jason Petta has demonstrated a method that alters the properties of a lone electron without disturbing the trillions of electrons in its immediate surroundings. The feat is essential to the development of future varieties of superfast computers with near-limitless capacities for data.

China on Friday unveiled a shake-up of the way land is seized for redevelopment. … Land seizures over the past decade have been central to the rapid modernization of hundreds of Chinese cities, which in turn has been one of the main drivers of the nation’s economic growth. But they also have been the source of often-violent conflicts, especially in the past year, as huge volumes of stimulus funds have gone into building projects.  Post

Rich stable nations, comfortable and safe on top of the global game, feel little inclination to consider big disruptive changes.  The price they pay for internal peace is the steady accumulation of Olsonian veto groups, who can block big changes.  Stable inflexible institutions seem acceptable when change is slow and life seem good enough.

This frustrates rich-nation would-be-rebels like me who see our business, legal, political, etc. institutions as far from optimal.  Such rebels want to explore big changes, but must either: 1) accept only tinkering around the edges, 2) move to a place more willing to make changes, or 3) wait for crises where larger changes might fly.

"The iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home." al3x on the iPad. Read it.

A recent study by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh found that workers with rheumatoid arthritis were comparable to non-impaired individuals in keyboarding speed. Individuals who were trained in touch typing demonstrated faster typing speeds than those using a visually-guided ("hunt and peck") method, regardless of impairment. Results of this study appear in the February issue of Arthritis Care & Research, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American College of Rheumatology.