Tales from the bits

UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale and many other schools have partnered with YouTube to make an official channel under the banner YouTube EDU. There is interesting content from classrooms or lecture halls with subject from almost all the fields of science. It is a great opportunity for learning or reviewing material of high quality. [...]

Nicolas Gisin, physicists, of the University of Geneva, Switzerland reported in Nature that they have made a solid-state device capable of storing protons for as long as 1 microsecond. The quantum-cryptography networks have currently a limited range to a few dozen kilometers because of a lack of a suitable way to store the quantum state [...]

Tanja Lange, Christiane Peters, and Daniel Bernstein researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology claim to have cracked the McEliece encryption system, which has been considered a strong security candidate for handling Internet traffic as we move into quantum computing. The researchers claimed on their paper that they have successfully developed and tested a way to [...]

Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie unveiled at PDC 2008 a new set of platform technologies, Windows Azure. The Azure Services Platform combines the growing power of the Web-based “cloud” and today’s computers and devices with a suite of services designed to help developers deliver compelling new experiences across the PC, Web and mobile phone [...]

In continuation to my previous article on .NET 4.0 there is some information on the new Visual Studio. Microsoft revealed an overview of VS2010.Designed to address the latest needs of developers, Visual Studio and the .NET Framework deliver key innovations in the following pillars:Democratizing Application Lifecycle ManagementApplication Lifecycle Management (ALM) crosses many roles within an [...]

(NewScientist.com) Elisha Moses at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his students Ofer Feinerman and Assaf Rotem have developed a way to control the growth pattern of neurons to build reliable circuits that use neurons rather than wires. The researchers built a device that acts like an AND logic gate, producing an [...]

(Der Spiegel) Europeana is a new online encyclopedia of European culture. Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, has pledged to preserve Europe’s cultural heritage through the digitization of the continent’s national libraries, and to make it freely accessible through the Europeana online encyclopedia scheduled for rollout in November 20.The digital content will [...]

(cnet news) Researchers Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini of the Swiss Security and Cryptography Laboratory at LASEC/EPFL, were able to recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters (about 65 feet), even through walls, simply by reading the electromagnetic emanations of the peripheral device. The experiments focused on wired keyboards attached [...]

(The New York Times) “Botnets” are home and business PCs that are hooked together into a vast chain of cyber-robots that do the bidding of automated programs to send the majority of e-mail spam, to illegally seek financial information and to install malicious software on still more PCs.Botnets control millions of PCs.The mean time to [...]

(Technology Review) Christina Smolke and Maung Nyan Win researchers from California Institute of Technology have created molecular computers that are able to self-assemble out of strips of RNA within living cells. The research creates the possibility of computing devices capable of responding to specific conditions within a cell, and could lead to drug delivery systems [...]