As the climate continues to change, some studies suggest that warmer temperatures may help plants bloom earlier and longer.
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Not all plants will respond equally to climate change
A paper published in Nature this week details how researchers have taken a common antenna design and replicated it on the the nanoscale level.
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Nanoscale optical antennas inspired by old-school TV aerials
In recent years the US has begun to lag in education for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and a number of efforts are underway to address this issue . We know that giving kids hands-on experience is one of the best ways to spark and keep their interest in STEM-related fields, and to this end, high schoolers all over the country are getting an opportunity to learn and apply STEM knowledge by participating in the annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest . Rube Goldberg, who was himself an engineer, is most famous for his cartoons that depicted contrived, complex contraptions for executing the most mundane tasks.
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feature: Rube Goldberg competition gets teens excited about STEM
“Everyone in the United States today should have access to broadband services supporting a basic set of applications that include sending and receiving e-mail, downloading Web pages, photos and video, and using simple video conferencing,” opens the chapter of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan titled “Availability.” What would that mean in terms of performance? “An initial universalization target of 4Mbps of actual download speed and 1Mbps of actual upload speed, with an acceptable quality of service for interactive applications, would ensure universal access,” the NBP says.
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NBP: Broadband for everyone by 2020, but who foots the bill?
General relativity, our current best understanding of gravity, has passed yet another test—this time on a much larger length scale. Ever since relativity’s first confirmation in 1919, when?Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington observed that?the light from distant stars was shifted by the mass of the sun, direct tests have been confined to length scales smaller than our solar system. No test to date has stringently probed general relativity’s applicability to the length scales of the universe itself
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General relativity passes a large scale test
A future full of helpful robots, quietly going about their business and assisting humans in thousands of small ways, is one of technology’s most long-deferred promises.
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feature: How robots think: an introduction
Scientists are quickly putting the single-qubit system out of fashion with new setups that can simultaneously manipulate and read multiple qubits. An international collaboration recently completed an experiment involving the control of up to ten qubits at once, using hyper-entanglement and simple “cat states.” While the system doesn’t always read out perfectly, the approach could be further refined to produce better results. Because qubit behavior is based in probability, it is difficult to exert a lot of control over a qubit
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Controlling multiple qubits with hyper-entanglement
BlackBerry users may be ready to move on to other smartphone platforms, suggesting that RIM isn’t keeping up with consumer demand in its efforts to combat growing encroachment from the likes of iPhone and Android.
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40% of Blackberry users willing to trade in for an iPhone
