Here’s some technology links that might pique your interest:
- Light Can Be Converted Into Matter
In 1934, two American physicists theorized that if one could make two photons collide, the collision would produce two positron-electron pairs—and thus convert light into matter. If proven in a lab, the process would be a pure demonstration of Einstein’s theory of relativity, E=mc2, which states that the mass of an object is also a measure of its stored energy. At the time the scientists—Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler, physicists at New York University—devised their hypothesis, there were no scientific tools available to demonstrate it, so the pair was left only with a theory, a very sound theory known thereafter as the Breit-Wheeler process, until technology could catch up.Exactly 80 years later, that time has finally arrived: theoretical physicists at Imperial College London have stumbled, quite by accident, upon a method that will demonstrate Breit and Wheeler’s theory. - Google Smartphone Becomes Brain Of Space Robot
Robots excel at the tedious, repetitive tasks that bore humans into ineffectiveness. So NASA has tweaked an experimental Google smartphone called “Project Tango” that takes 250,000 measurements per second to create a 3-D map of the environment. The hacked version of Project Tango will help provide navigation information for a utility robot that previously had limited autonomous motion capability, called SPHERES. - GoogleCar Has No Steering Wheel, No Brakes
The two-seat, all-electric autonomous automobile is remarkable mainly for the features it doesn’t have, such as a steering wheel, a dashboard, and a brake pedal. “We took a look from the ground up and asked what should self driving cars be like?” Brin said during an interview on Tuesday night. - Bogus User-Generated CNN Asteroid Apocalypse Article Goes Viral
Anyone can contribute to iReport, and someone contributed this semi-realistic (but comically overwrought) post. Readers spread the article — it has 23,000 shares on social media, which is formidable — and eventually 200,000 people saw it, most presumably thinking it was real news, stocking their bomb shelters accordingly. - In the space between order and chaos scientists are finding new rules for life.
They’re researching the dynamics of criticality, where one system transforms rapidly into another. Scientists have studied such behavior in physical systems for decades; some have theorized that it might be found in living systems too, perhaps underlying some of biology’s fundamental and largely unexplained phenomena: how a few interacting genes shape an organism’s development, and how networked neurons give rise to complex cognitive functions.