word lens

As I get older and closer to death, more and more things seem like they have a bit of magic in them - this is one of them
WORD LENS


Arthur C. Clarke : Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The building block of a quantum photon switch

Matthew A. Hall, Joseph B. Altepeter, and Prem Kumar from the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing at Northwestern University in Illinois have constructed a switch which fulfills these requirements and characterize its performance at the single photon level; it exhibits a 200-ps switching window, a 120:1 contrast ratio, 1.5 dB loss, and induces no measurable degradation in the switched photons entangled-state fidelity -less than 0.002

In other words the basic building block for a quantum photon switch

paper is here

Physical review letter is available to buy here

Diagram of the experimental apparatus and summary is here

Ultrafast ten to 200 picosecond switching of photonic entanglement

Solution to Erdös' Distinct Distances Problem has been found

Poincaré conjecture was proved [and confirmed in 2006] and now another of mathematics' holy grails falls by the way side.
While not one of the Millennium problems its very significant none the less...

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/17494.html

Actual paper is here

Information converted to energy

Physicists in Japan have (kind of) built a Maxwell's daemon ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon ) that (kind of) converts information into energy

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/44385

This does not violate the second law of thermodynamics as far more energy is used in the supporting apporatus than is gained in the experiment.

MAd SciEncE zapzap chooCh0o

Sub micrometer tapered hexagonal pillars of indium-gallium arsenide for on silicon lasers!

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20096-first-lasers-grown-directly-on-silicon-chips.html



Programable molecular motor seen to travel 100nm wide DNA base pair track using atomic force microscopy at about 0.1 nm/s!!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110206132857.htm



Richard Feynman nanoprocessor idea becoming a reality thanks to Harvard University and MITRE Corp
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110209131824.htm

12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online For Free

all in one place....

12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online For Free:

datasets

Here are a bunch of datasets in one place

http://rs.io/2014/05/29/list-of-data-sets.html

http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory

http://infochimps.com

http://www.delicious.com/jbaldwinconnect/DataSets

http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/

http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/

http://www.delicious.com/pskomoroch/dataset+redistributable

http://data.nsw.gov.au

http://data.worldbank.org/