Computing

IBM researchers have created a subatomic snapshot of the electric charge within a molecule, an advance that could have applications in ever-smaller transistors or in solar power.

Scientists from IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, published a paper in Nature Nanotechnology today that describes a technique for measuring how electrons move when forming molecular bonds. This method allows them to create images of how the electric charge is distributed within molecules, giving science a better picture of chemistry at the molecular level, said Fabian Mohn, who coauthored the paper.

Having a picture of the electric charge distribution could be useful tool … Read more

What does it feel like to chop down a tree? Or walk a narrow plank suspended above a deep pit? Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab can take you there.

Professor Jeremy Bailenson has created a thoroughly convincing virtual-reality environment at the Stanford lab. But what makes it feel so real? The lab uses technology to provide sensory feedback in a couple of different ways. There are devices called "butt-kickers" under the floor that make it shake, 22 speakers provide audio input, and, lastly, there's the head-mounted display that offers a stereoscopic view of the virtual … Read more

Techies are all abuzz about 3D printing. Imagine turning your photographs into 3D models. Autodesk recently unveiled two free pieces of software that enable users to do just that.

The software, called 123D Catch and 123D Make, creates a 3D model of your images, which can then be sent to a 3D printer or can be constructed out of cardboard as a template. SmartPlanet recently talked to Autodesk to see how it all works.

This video originally appeared on SmartPlanet with the headline "Print 3D models out of your pictures."

Related SmartPlanet links

Researchers are getting down to the atomic level in the pursuit of smaller and more powerful computers.

The University of New South Wales in Australia today announced it has made a single-atom transistor using a repeatable method, a development that could lead to computing devices that use these tiny building blocks.

About two years ago, a team of researchers from the Helsinki University of Technology, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Melbourne in Australia announced the creation of a single-atom transistor designed around a single phosphorus atom in silicon.

Now a new paper published in the … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Armies of entrepreneurs are trying to make money sifting through mountains of data from the Web and other sources, but one of the biggest challenges is simply getting control of the data in the first place

Entrepreneurs at an event here this week said that the trend of "big data," or collecting and analyzing reams of information from varied sources, threatens incumbent technology providers and enables applications once considered impossible. Startups are harnessing massive amounts of data to generate personalized entertainment ideas, predict how media coverage will affect company stock prices, or analyze genomes in the … Read more

There was a time when IBM's mainframes were cutting-edge machines for scientific and engineering calculations.

Those days began in the 1960s, when IBM's System 360 rewrote the rules of computing and before humans walked on the moon. Big Blue long since has moved its high-performance technical computing effort toward its high-end Blue Gene systems and more conventional Linux servers using Intel and AMD x86 chips and Unix servers with its own Power processor. IBM's System Z mainframe line is now geared for commercial customers who are willing to pay a premium for reliability and high performance for … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--In its typically geeky fashion, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology celebrated the birth of one of the first video games by challenging students to re-create it on a computer the size of a business card.

MIT engineering students and faculty this week showed off a simulation of Spacewar on campus and at the MIT Museum to mark the 50th anniversary of the video game's release. Written by four students in their spare time, the video game influenced how many later games were designed and was part of a broader shift in how people viewed computers.

Spacewar, created … Read more

Researchers have created the smallest room-temperature laser, a breakthrough that could lead to faster optical computers.

A group at the University of California at San Diego published a paper in Nature today that describes a new method for making lasers smaller than ever before. The technique allows for low-power lasers smaller than one micron in diameter. A human hair is about 600 microns wide and air-borne particles such as pollen are as small as 10 microns.

The advance in producing a low-power laser opens up many applications, according to the UC San Diego team. Nanolasers could be used to send … Read more

The prototype for Google's HUD glasses has been seen, according to tech news site 9to5Google. And, supposedly they resemble Oakley's Thump glasses, which makes them look a lot like something the Terminator might wear.

But, it's not just how Google's glasses look, their function also mirrors something out of the Terminator trilogy.

In December, rumors spread that Google was finishing up a prototype on high-tech glasses known as wearable head-up displays (HUD) that could tap into Google's cloud-based location services and detail users' surroundings. The information would then appear as an augmented reality computer display. … Read more