 | Engineers enable 'bulk' silicon to emit visible light for the first time Mar 27th 2013, 17:35 Electronic computing speeds are brushing up against limits imposed by the laws of physics. Photonic computing, where photons replace comparatively slow electrons in representing information, could surpass those limitations, but the components of such computers require semiconductors that can emit light. Now, new research has enabled "bulk" silicon to emit broad-spectrum, visible light for the first time, opening the possibility of using the element in devices that have both electronic and photonic components. | | How hard is it to 'de-anonymize' cellphone data? Mar 27th 2013, 17:25 Scientists analyzed data on 1.5 million cellphone users in a small European country over a span of 15 months and found that just four points of reference, with fairly low spatial and temporal resolution, was enough to uniquely identify 95 percent of them. This means that to extract the complete location information for a single person from an "anonymized" data set of more than a million people, all you would need to do is place him or her within a couple of hundred yards of a cellphone transmitter, sometime over the course of an hour, four times in one year. A few Twitter posts would probably provide all the information you needed, if they contained specific information about the person's whereabouts. | | Superhero supercomputer helps battle autism Mar 26th 2013, 20:23 When it officially came online at the San Diego Supercomputer Center in early January 2012, Gordon was instantly impressive. In one demonstration, it sustained more than 35 million input/output operations per second -- then, a world record. | | Personal monitor system could change healthcare Mar 25th 2013, 16:44 A wireless personal health monitoring system using smartphones to upload data via the Internet will revolutionize the U.S. healthcare industry, its pioneering creators say. | | Feeling sick makes us less social online, too Mar 25th 2013, 14:15 When it comes to posting on social media, there are few areas of our lives that are off limits. We post about eating, working, playing, hunting, quilting – you name it. Just about everything is up for public consumption … except our health. | | Magnets are chaotic -- and fast -- at the very smallest scale Mar 18th 2013, 17:24 Using a new type of camera that makes extremely fast snapshots with an extremely high resolution, it is now possible to observe the behavior of magnetic materials at the nanoscale. This behavior is more chaotic than previously thought. The observed behavior changes our understanding of data storage, researchers say. | |
