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Illustration: Chad Hagen Wirelessly transfer huge files in the blink of an eye! Detect bombs, poison gas clouds, and concealed weapons from afar! Peer through walls with T-ray vision! You can do it all with terahertz technology—or so you might believe after perusing popular accounts of the subject. The truth is a bit more nuanced. […]

SPECIAL REPORT: DO-IT-ALL DEVICESLike the idea of a handheld device that can be any of about 10 different gizmos, depending on your mood? You could soon have one if the ideas described in this two-part report become reality. In this article, Nick Tredennick and Brion Shimamoto of the Gilder Technology Report tell why only programmable logic devices

IMAGE: JAMES LUKENS, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT STONY BROOK [1] Researchers have demonstrated simple digital frequency dividers with Josephson junctions that have 0.25-µm minimum features and that operate at data rates up to 770 Gb/s. They rely on rapid single flux quantum (RSFQ) circuits, whose speed grows as junction sizes shrink. At 0.25

The year is 2028. It’s 8 p.m. on a Wednesday night and you’re famished. You’re staring wistfully at the only remaining item in your refrigerator: a package of sausages with an unappetizing grayish hue. Ugh. Did they always look like that? Are they still safe to eat? In 2018, you’d have to rely on your

Illustration: Rob Magiera The son of a British Quaker schoolteacher who became a brilliant orator but believed that practical study was more important than lectures, a mathematical genius fleeing Germany because of his socialist views who was almost turned back by New York customs officials as medically unfit, and two educators, one self-taught in engineering,

A group of eleven UK companies has been awarded funding by the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund for a project designed to bring technology to the fore in the farm-to-fork ecosystem. The award is part of ‘Made Smarter Innovation delivered by UK Research and Innovation’   The SecQuAL (Secure Quality Assured Logistics for Digital Food Ecosystems)

The classic Rubik’s Cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different states. You might well wonder how people are able to take a scrambled cube and bring it back to its original configuration, with just one color showing on each side. Some people are even able to do this blindfolded after viewing the scrambled cube once. Such feats are

First in a 2-part series on quantum computing. Computers today are fast approaching some fundamental limitations. Perhaps their biggest problem is that they exploit the classical physics that governs the hurly-burly rush of countless billions of electrons through nearly as many transistors. And the chips at the heart of today’s computers are running out of

From the outside, transistors seem so simple and straightforward. But inside, they’re actually a mess. If you could watch them working at the level of atoms, you’d see the electronic equivalent of a game of bumper cars. Electrons moving through even the best transistor channel can’t go in straight lines. Instead they’re buffeted continually by

In Flight: NASA astronaut Andrew Feustel installs a materials science experiment pallet on the outsideof the International Space Station. The box includes three prototypes of integrated circuit spacecraft. The spacecraft prototype at right was photographed before installation on the space station. Photos: left, NASA; right, Zac Manchester Gravity may be woven into the very fabric