Month: September 2007

Street Techie Alberto Gaitan writes “Some birds (and maybe newts!) may have HUDs:”

Published on the Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) website, a paper describes how one team of scientists in Germany studied a specie of nocturnal migratory bird to test the hypothesis that birds of that type may be able to visually detect the earth’s magnetic field providing them with what may amount to a head-up display (HUD). Birds trained to orient to magnetic fields managed to do so quickly when tested in white or short wavelength light (i.e., blue and green) but had a hard time doing so when tested in yellow or red light. These previous findings, along with new neuronal tracing data that shows that the part of their brain most active during magnetic orientation is their visual thalamus, suggests that they used visual cues to hop into proper position when the magnetic field changed during the lab experiments.

From Reuters:

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. physicists have coaxed tiny artificial atoms into communicating in an advance that may lead to super-fast quantum computers, the researchers said on Wednesday.

Quantum computers hold the promise of being enormously powerful, capable of solving in seconds problems that take today’s fastest machines years to crack.

So far, physicists have worked mostly on developing the most basic of elements that can store information known as quantum bits, or qubits.

But a series of papers in the journal Nature suggest researchers have found a way to get these qubits to communicate over a distance, for instance, across a computer chip.

In the past, the best qubits could do was talk to neighboring qubits, much like the childhood game of telephone.

But researchers from Yale University have found a way to move information stored in a stationary quantum bit via a microwave photon to another stationary quantum bit on the same chip.

Read the rest…

Thanks, Ron!

This is incredible:

Lockheed Martin is looking to supply the Pentagon with flying cameras …. A miniature payload module about the size of an Altoid can be carried by this single-wing Nano Air Vehicle (NAV), sized and shaped like a maple tree seed. The minuscule vehicle is packed with navigation and communications equipment, imaging devices, and sensors that sniff the air for chemicals or detect signs of life such as body heat and breathing.

From Sci Fi Tech blog.