Superconductivity—the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with no resistance—continues to be one of the most challenging fields in materials science. On the one hand, the effect appears reliably in a number of materials, although only at very low temperatures. Those temperatures went up with the discovery of copper-based (cuprate) superconductors … [Read more...]

Intel is opening up its manufacturing facilities to third parties, as it takes the further tentative steps toward building a chip-to-order foundry business. The microprocessor giant announced last year that it would build FPGAs for Achronix Semiconductor, and on Tuesday a second FPGA designer, Tabula, said that it would have its chips built by Intel. In its announcement, Tabula emphasized that it would be using Intel's cutting-edge 22nm process … [Read more...]

Over the past week, Google has been called out for bypassing default privacy settings in both Safari and Internet Explorer in order to serve up advertising cookies. The two cases were quite different. With Safari, Google acknowledged the problem and said it was an accident. With Internet Explorer, Google said it was using the best available workaround for an outdated browser privacy technology that limits the capabilities of modern … [Read more...]

A few days after I received my PlayStation Vita review unit in the mail, I got a set of six plastic cards with boxy black and white patterns on them. The free "augmented reality" games that rely on those cards were made available for download on the PlayStation Network today, and while the games definitely take place on a backdrop of reality, I'm not really sure how much the real world is being "augmented" through the Vita. … [Read more...]

Since September, scientists have been scratching their head over results that appear to show neutrinos traveling between Switzerland and Italy faster than light would. As far as anyone could tell, the team behind the results had done everything they could to eliminate errors, and had even released some preliminary data that had strengthened their results. But the results remained difficult to square with everything else we know about how the … [Read more...]

Nokia is gearing up for some big smartphone announcements at Mobile World Congress next week, and not all are related to Windows Phone. In addition to a few Windows Phone handsets, the company is also teasing a camera-centric Symbian phone with one of the largest camera sensors on a mobile phone yet. First, the Symbian outlier: the Nokia 803 will have a large imaging sensor that will be Nokia's big step up to 1080p video, according to PocketNow. … [Read more...]

Trying to pass unconstitutional restrictions on a burgeoning artistic medium is not cheap. Just ask the state of California, which will end up paying $1.8 million in attorney's fees in its failed effort to restrict violent game sales to children with a law that was overturned by the Supreme Court last year. It was widely reported last month that the state would be paying $950,000 to cover legal costs for the Entertainment Merchants Association … [Read more...]

The Apache Software Foundation has announced the availability of Apache 2.4, a major update of the popular open source HTTP server. The arrival of the new version, which is the first major release of Apache in six years, coincides with the software's 17th anniversary. The Apache project emerged in 1995 around a fork of a Web server that was originally developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Apache became the … [Read more...]