Category: IT

By Alice Klein I feel like I’ve landed on an alien planet. I’m walking across the surface of a breast cancer cell as drug nanoparticles whizz past my head like spaceships. One of the particles suddenly crashes in front of me, and I teeter on the edge of an abyss as it is sucked through the surface. It feels real – and in a sense, it is. The cell I am exploring in virtual reality is not a conceptual model. John McGhee of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and…

As powerful as today’s traditional supercomputers are, they still struggle greatly with modeling chemical systems. For example, chemists still don’t fully understand exactly how bacteria produce fertilizer at room temperature. Considering the fact that fertilizer production is inefficient and consumes as much as two percent of the world’s energy each year, solving its mysteries could save billions of dollars. Now, researchers from Harvard, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, UC Santa Barbara, Tufts University and University College London are one step closer to being able to solve that and other difficult models…

By Jacob Aron Useful quantum computers are one step closer, thanks to the latest demonstration of a technique designed to stop them making mistakes. Quantum computers store information as quantum bits, or qubits. Unlike binary bits, which store a 0 or a 1, qubits can hold a mixture of both states at the same time, boosting their computing potential for certain types of problems. But qubits are fragile – their quantum nature means they can’t hold data for long before errors creep in. So researchers wanting to build large-scale computers invented quantum…

Haptics are a happening area in virtual reality these days. The term refers to devices and technologies that produce tactile sensations to go along with all those immersive visuals and sounds. The makers of the Oculus Rift, along with parent company Facebook, are working on a potential haptic add-on to their virtual reality headset. It’s called HapticWave, and it’s kind of like a omnidirectional virtual reality glove, without the glove. I swear — write about this stuff long enough and everything starts to sound like a Zen koan. According to an interesting report…

Iron Man’s suit. Captain America’s shield. The Batmobile. These all could look a lot more realistic thanks to a new algorithm developed by a team of U.S. computer graphics experts. The researchers, led by Professor Ravi Ramamoorthi at the University of California San Diego, have created a method to improve how computer graphics software reproduces the way light interacts with extremely small details, called glints, on the surface of a wide range of materials, including metallic car paints, metal finishes for electronics and injection-molded plastic finishes. The method developed by…