Category: IT

A new “atomic memory” device that encodes data atom by atom can store hundreds of times more data than current hard disks can, a new study finds. “You would need just the area of a postage stamp to write out all books ever written,” said study senior author Sander Otte, a physicist at the Delft University of Technology’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands. In fact, the researchers estimated that if they created a cube 100 microns wide — about the same diameter as the average human hair —…

Virtual reality is creating new opportunities across the media landscape, not only for film directors but also journalists, activists, and multimedia artists. Its creators are often all three—they’re ambitious storytellers who aren’t afraid to cross media borders and test the possibilities of the latest technologies. For its Storyscapes competition and Virtual Arcade, the Tribeca Film Festival will return to the Tribeca Festival Hub, a multimedia destination where the public can experience the newest experiments in digital creation and the vast potential for immersive media experiences. Four of the projects included in this year’s innovative…

The human eye can only focus on one surprisingly small area at a time, while our peripheral vision gives us the general gist of what else is nearby. That means a lot of processing power that goes into fully rendering virtual reality environments in focus is wasted when you’re only really taking in a small area of the screen at any given time. Nvidia has developed a rendering technique that allows that wasted processing power to be redirected to allow developers to create more immersive VR environments. The technique, called…

Facebook is set to take its worldwide internet project to new heights, all the way to geostationary orbit, to be specific. The social media giant has announced a new partnership with French firm Eutelsat, with plans to launch a satellite into space next year in hope of bringing millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa online. The satellite is already under construction. Being built by Israeli firm Spacecom, the AMOS-6 satellite is designed to address the gaps in internet access throughout West, East and Southern Africa that cannot be filled by…

For nearly 10 years, computer processors have been getting faster by using multiple cores rather than raising their individual speeds. This measure makes our PCs and smartphones more power-efficient, but also makes it much trickier to write programs that take full advantage of their hardware. Swarm, a new chip design developed at MIT, could now come to the rescue and unleash the full power of parallel processing for up to 75-fold speedups, while requiring programmers to write a fraction of the code. Developed by Prof. Daniel Sanchez and team, Swarm is…

In a warehouse in Somerset, the latest phase in Facebook’s bid for world domination has been taking shape. Or, to put it less dramatically, the social network’s plan to connect millions in developing countries is proceeding. It is called Project Aquila and involves building solar-powered aircraft which will fly for months at a time above remote places, beaming down an internet connection. Two years ago Facebook bought small British business Ascenta, which specialises in solar-powered drones, and its owner Andy Cox is now the engineer running Project Aquila. At the…