Today's
search engines chew up a lot of bandwidth
crawling the Net and still can't touch the
vast amounts of data in the deep Web. A proposal
for building search capabilities into the
Internet could lighten the load and extend
the reach. Full
story
Robot
guided by its voice
Researchers generally help robots navigate by giving
them the sense of sight. This is relatively complicated
and expensive, however. A simpler approach is based
on another human trait: listening to the sound of
one's own voice. It also helps if the walls have
ears.
Angle
speeds plastic transistor
Going with the flow is a good way to pick up speed,
particularly for plastic transistors. It turns out
that the way the molecules of organic crystals are
oriented relative to the electrodes of a transistor
makes a big difference. Rotating the crystal 180
degrees can change the transistor's performance
by as much as 3.5 times.
Sturdy
quantum computing demoed
The atomic or subatomic components of prototype
quantum computers usually have to be carefully sheltered
from the environment, but a method that makes qubits
immune to noise shows promise. A demonstration of
a quantum search algorithm shows that decoherence-free
subspaces can support a full computation.
