A couple of days ago a research team comprised of faculty at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, the University of Southampton in the UK, and IQFR-CSIC in Madrid, Spain published a paper containing a creative solution to a problem known to be NP-complete, namely a version of the traveling salesman problem. The TSP, in summary, postulates a scenario in which you have an arbitrary number of towns spread over a large area and an arbitrary number of paths connecting them. What is the shortest possible path one can take in which the traveler visits each town only once and returns …
It’s long been a trope of science fiction where one of the characters has the capacity for superhuman access to data in realtime, usually through prosthetic eyes that incorporate heads-up displays that make geospatial coordinates and targeting information available without the distraction of having to look down at a monitor of some kind. In point of fact, this isn’t anything particularly new. Fighter jets like the FA-18 have long had transparent monitors positioned directly in the pilot’s field of vision that incorporate much of the information of the instruments on the panel. Players of first-person shooters like …
Physicists at the University of Rochester have made a breakthrough in data storage technology, namely, they've been able to store an entire image within a single photon using holographic techniques. An image of the UofR logo was cut into a stencil and a beam of laser light was passed through a beam splitter (classic holographic imaging technique); then a single photon from that beam was passed through the cut out portion of the stencil. Due to the nature of quantum mechanics, that photon passed through every region of the cut away part of the stencil (or at least, that's how …