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If you were expecting some kind warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again.There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements. In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe. Their weapon of choice - the algorithm. > "We are writing these things that we can no longer read," warned Mr Slavin. "We've rendered something illegible. And we've lost the sense of what's actually happening in this world...

Scientists have long sought easier ways to make the costly material known as enriched uranium — the fuel of nuclear reactors and bombs, now produced only in giant industrial plants. One idea, a half-century old, has been to do it with nothing more substantial than lasers and their rays of concentrated light. This futuristic approach has always proved too expensive and difficult for anything but laboratory experimentation. Until now. In a little-known effort, General Electric has successfully tested laser enrichment for two years and is seeking federal permission to build a $1 billion plant that would make reactor fuel by...

Superman's memory crystals may become reality in computers Computers may soon be saving their data onto hard drives made of glass following research by British scientists who have developed a way of storing information similar to the "memory crystals" seen in the Superman films. By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent 9:45AM BST 14 Aug 2011 Researchers at Southampton University used lasers to rearrange the atoms in pieces of glass, turning it into new type of computer memory. They claim the glass memory is far more stable and resilient than current types of hard-drive memory, which have a limited lifespan of a...

By combining two frontier technologies, spintronics and straintronics, a team of researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University has devised perhaps the world's most miserly integrated circuit. Their proposed design runs on so little energy that batteries are not even necessary; it could run merely by tapping the ambient energy from the environment. Rather than the traditional charge-based electronic switches that encode the basic 0s and 1s of computer lingo, spintronics harnesses the natural spin – either up or down – of electrons to store bits of data. Spin one way and you get a 0; switch the spin the other way...

GAMBLERS already had enough to think about without factoring the end of time into their calculations. But a year after a group of cosmologists argued that they should, another team says time need not end after all. It all started with this thought experiment. In a back room in a Las Vegas casino, you are handed a fair coin to flip. You will not be allowed to see the outcome, and the moment the coin lands you will fall into a deep sleep. If the coin lands heads up, the dealer will wake you 1 minute later; tails, in 1...

Energy-harvesting windows are a step closer with the development of a transparent lithium ion battery, created by US researchers at Stanford University. The electrodes are confined to a grid 35µm wide, making them too narrow to be perceived by the naked eye.The electrodes pose the biggest challenge to transparent lithium ion batteries, as both anode and cathode materials are typically opaque. Yi Cui's team solved this problem by making them very thin. They set the electrode materials into a grid of trenches in clear polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). By stacking and aligning the grids with additional layers of electrodes, it is possible...

Researchers in South Korea and the UK have produced a film that makes electricity when you bend it - and crucially it is over a million times better at this than other crystalline solids with the same properties. Their approach makes it possible to control the strength of permanent electric fields in designer films, which is required for devices like photovoltaics. Piezoelectric materials generate electric fields when pressed or pulled. In contrast, flexoelectric materials produce these fields when bent - they react to variation in strain across the material, rather than strain itself. But because solids are typically difficult to bend,...

Enlarge Image Antimatter reservoir. A newly discovered belt of antiprotons lies within the innermost portion (pink) of Earth's magnetosphere, the large bubblelike region interior to the blue arc that is controlled by the planet's magnetic field. Credit: Aaron Kaase/NASA/Goddard A newly discovered belt of antimatter circling Earth could be an astronaut's best friend. The belt, which consists of antiprotons trapped by Earth's magnetic field several hundred kilometers above the planet's surface, may ultimately become a key source of fuel for missions venturing beyond the solar system. Researchers analyzing data from the PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter/Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics)...

Intense pressure can force neutrons into cubes rather than spheres, say physicistsInside atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons fill space with a packing density of 0.74, meaning that only 26 percent of the volume of the nucleus in is empty. That's pretty efficient packing. Neutrons achieve a similar density inside neutron stars, where the force holding neutrons together is the only thing that prevents gravity from crushing the star into a black hole. Today, Felipe Llanes-Estrada at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and Gaspar Moreno Navarro at Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, say neutrons can do even better. These...

Manchester is hosting a series of events to mark the centenary of a paper by Ernest Rutherford that changed the way we looked at the world and Universe around us.In 1911, Rutherford, described as the father of nuclear physics, presented his research to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which - for the first time - described a "planetary structure" of atoms, one that we still recognise today. "Before Rutherford, people had thought about atoms as an amorphous lump, the "plum pudding model" we sometimes hear about," explained Catherine Rushmore, science curator at the Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi)....

TO infinity and beyond? We may not have any viable alternative fuel sources here on Earth yet, but scientists may have discovered an alternative – in space. Researchers at the Pamela satellite (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics), discovered the largest known collection of anti-matter near Earth, trapped between the Van Allen belts. The Van Allen belts are a series of donut-shaped rings containing positively charged particles trapped by cosmic rays, solar winds and Earth's magnetic field. The belts themselves are formed by the particles “smashing” into molecules that make up Earth’s atmosphere, causing showers of particles. It...

While Matthew Nesbit opines on peak oil being a uniting cause, this short essay on thorium power is instructive and relevant. – Anthony Guest post by David ArchibaldEarly in June, I gave a lecture entitled “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” at the Institute for World Politics (a graduate school for the CIA and State Department) in Washington. From that lecture, following are a couple of slides pertaining to the advantage of thorium relative to uranium for nuclear power: To run a 1,000 MW reactor for a year requires one tonne of nuclear material to be fissioned. In the case of...

Study hard, receive a science or engineering degree, and your reward will be a well-paying job in your chosen field. That's part of the sales pitch for those trying to attract more women into science. But according to a new U.S. government study, the "reward" includes earning 12% less than your male counterparts. The 11-page report(PDF), "Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation," is the first analysis of women working in technical fields (STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) by the Commerce Department's Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA). The study is based on data from the 2009...

Stephen Hawking is squaring off with God, saying that God did not have a hand in creating the universe and that the "laws of science" can explain how the universe created itself from nothing. In the premiere episode of The Discovery Channel’s latest series "Curiosity," set for Sunday at 8 p.m. ET, Hawking takes on the question: "Is There a Creator?" Hawking, who has done extensive research on several contentious topics such as time travel, parallel universes and black holes, says that God was not necessary for the creation of the universe. He proposes that it is possible that the...

Professor Stephen Hawking's support for the global warming myth raises doubts about his knowledge of physics. Professor Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" is one of the books I would like to reread if I could find the time. However, after learning that he supports the global warming myth I would read the book a little more critically than I did the first time. Hawking says he's concerned about earth becoming as hot as Venus, but the alleged "greenhouse effect" cannot explain temperatures on Venus as I noted in my previous post. Venus Not an Example of Greenhouse Gas...

Ever wondered what would happen if the dimension of time came to a sudden end? A new experiment reveals all One of the most exciting areas of science is the emerging field of spacetime analogues. This is the discipline in which physicists play around with systems that have a formal mathematical link with general relativity. For example, changes in the way electrons move in graphene as it is cooled are identical to the changes that may have occurred in the universe soon after the big bang. So physicists can use cool graph to test theories about the universe's earliest behaviour....

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers who have been working for nearly a decade to piece together the process by which an enzyme repairs sun-damaged DNA have finally witnessed the entire process in full detail in the laboratory. What they saw contradicts fundamental notions of how key biological molecules break up during the repair of sunburn – and that knowledge could someday lead to drugs or even lotions that could heal sunburn in humans. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Ohio State University researchers and their colleagues confirm what was previously known about the enzyme photolyase, which is...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is offering money to researchers looking at identifying and controlling timing mechanisms in cells, including those of the human body. The blue sky gazing loon-collective notes that no single "master switch" has been found to control genes' activities. But it hopes that the "Biochronicity" programme will find a way to understand and predict "temporal features of biological systems". The four-year programme will start by identifying "episequences and validation in experimental biological systems". After two years, DARPA hopes to move to Phase II, which aims to conduct Live Fire Tests. Should the research prove...

Radio noise from distant cosmos is six times louder than expected..... LONG BEACH, Calif. - Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected. The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it. Of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can't very efficiently. But radio waves can....

A violation of one of the oldest empirical laws of physics has been observed by scientists at the University of Bristol. Their experiments on purple bronze, a metal with unique one-dimensional electronic properties, indicate that it breaks the Wiedemann-Franz Law. This historic discovery is described in a paper published today in Nature Communications. In 1853, two German physicists, Gustav Wiedemann and Rudolf Franz, studied the thermal conductivity (a measure of a system’s ability to transfer heat) of a number of elemental metals and found that the ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities was approximately the same for different metals...