Category: IT

Science fiction movies such as Ant-Man and Fantastic Voyage excite us about the possibility of shrinking ourselves down to the subatomic level. In the Disney version of The Sword in the Stone, Merlin defeats the sorceress Madam Mim in a shape shifting battle by turning into a microbe which makes her sick. All of these touch upon the power that comes with being able to control what is infinitesimally small. In reality, science has made great progress in this regard. But we’re not quite there yet. The prefix nano comes from ancient Greek meaning, “dwarf.”…

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For those people seeking some long-term postmortem respect, you could always go the route of theRoyal Tenenbaum epitaph and have your hyperbolic greatness engraved upon a headstone. But we all know weather eventually gets the better of those words, and besides: Why settle for one measly sentence when you could speak directly to your descendants from beyond the grave? The Objecs company has the answer: RosettaStone “technology enhanced memorial products,” which, preloaded with your autobiographical information, will attach to your grave. From Discovery News: When your great-great-great granddaughter stops by sometime in the…

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As technology continues to get smaller and smaller, the opportunities for it to improve our lives only continue to grow exponentially. Eventually, these advancements turn a corner and open up a whole new world of possibilities. Consider the phone, for example. At some point in the mid-90s the technology became compact enough to allow for a model that anyone could sensibly carry at all times. Sure, there had been mobile phones before then, but the technology needed time to develop before it could become truly viable. The medical tech industry…

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Scientists have realized a photon-photon logic gate via a deterministic interaction with a strongly coupled atom-resonator system. “Nothing is impossible!” In line with this motto, physicists from the Quantum Dynamics Division of Professor Gerhard Rempe (director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics) managed to realise a quantum logic gate in which two light quanta are the main actors. The difficulty of such an endeavour is that photons usually do not interact at all but pass each other undisturbed. This makes them ideal for the transmission of quantum information,…

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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…

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Virtual reality has been tied to gaming for a while, but as the technology progresses, more and more uses are surfacing. It’s being used in many industries in various capacities, very often involving job training or new ways of introducing an audience to a concept or experience. Below are 10 different industries that are using virtual reality and how they’re incorporating it into everyday life. Healthcare Virtual reality has multiple applications for healthcare. One use, which is actually not brand new, is the use of VR in therapy. For example,…

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Yale University scientists have reached a milestone in their efforts to extend the durability and dependability of quantum information. For the first time, researchers at Yale have crossed the “break even” point in preserving a bit of quantum information for longer than the lifetime of its constituent parts. They have created a novel system to encode, spot errors, decode, and correct errors in a quantum bit, also known as a “qubit.” The development of such a robust method of Quantum Error Correction (QEC) has been one of the biggest remaining…

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When people experience virtual reality for the first time, a common reaction is to start imagining all the different uses the technology might hold. Even within one industry, healthcare, the potential is open-ended. The good thing is that scientists and medical professionals have been at the drawing board for years now, developing and implementing virtual reality in ways that can help them train, diagnose, and treat in myriad situations. Here are just ten of the use cases that are currently in practice and continually developing as the technology itself develops…

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For some, scrolling through a Facebook News Feed is the modern day equivalent of clicking through television channels with a remote control. That analogue is about to become a bit more explicit: ABC News announced Monday morning that it will use the social network to stream live video coverage of the 2016 presidential election 24 hours a day during the Republican andDemocratic National Conventions. ABC will program video content specifically for audiences on Facebook. On Monday, for example, ABC’s “This Week” broadcast a live, 12-minute interview with Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show” via the social network. Facebook…

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Getting VR-ready requires a pretty beefy rig, and there’s usually an equally-beefy price tag attached. AMD is looking to lower that barrier with the US$199Radeon RX 480 graphics card. That $199 will net you the 4GB edition of the Radeon RX 480, which AMD says packs the punch of a $500 GPU in terms of VR performance. With this price point the company hopes to drive up adoption rates of VR, encourage developers to create more content for the platform and drive down the costs of VR-ready computers and equipment.…

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