Google Creative Director Alexander Chen composes a song by filming some solo viola melodies on Google Glass and then weaving the video clips together in overlapping loops.
What results is not only a catchy musical piece, but a peek into the first-person visual perspective of the instrument player as things continue to happen in the room. It’s as if the music is being scored for that moment, as the dog and baby play in the background.
Watch more videos featuring instruments and music.
via explore-blog.
A Big Step Toward a Silicon Quantum Computer
Quantum computers could more easily become a reality if they incorporated the silicon semiconductor processing used by the modern electronics industry. Physicists in Australia have recently taken a new step toward that vision by reading and writing the nuclear spin state of a single phosphorus atom implanted in silicon.
In a breakthrough reported in the 18 April edition of the journal Nature, physicists have finally achieved an idea first proposed in 1998 by Bruce Kane, a physicist at the University of Maryland, in College Park. Such success could lead to quantum computers based on the same silicon-processing technology used for computer chips.
“What we are trying to do is demonstrate that there is a viable way to take the same physical platform and fabrication technology used to make any computer and mobile phone in the world, and twist it into a technology for quantum information processing,” says Andrea Morello, a quantum physicist at the University of New South Wales, in Australia.
Scientists envision quantum computers as the ideal devices for cracking modern encryption codes, searching through huge databases, and understanding the biological interactions of molecules and drugs. Quantum computing’s potential comes from harnessing the laws of quantum physics that allow the spin state of an electron or an atom’s nucleus to achieve “superposition”—existing in more than one state at a time. A classical computer bit can exist either as a 1 or a 0, but a quantum bit, or qubit, is capable of existing in multiple states at the same time.
With other quantum computing approaches, researchers have tried trapping and isolating atoms by using electromagnetic fields or superconductor materials. By comparison, Kane suggested harnessing the nuclear spin of phosphorus atoms embedded in a silicon crystal as a qubit.
Silicon-based quantum computing also offers long coherence times for electron and nuclear spins, Kane says. That means the electron spin states and nuclear spin states acting as qubits could hold on to their information for long periods of time, something that other quantum computing schemes have struggled with.
(via ikenbot)
The real breakthrough of Google Glass: controlling the internet of things — GigaOM
Many of the first apps for Google Glass will be about consuming and sharing content on the go. But what if Google Glass could unlock control over the world of the Internet of Things both inside and outside the home?
(via emergentfutures)
It’s my tumblr and this is science because I say it is…
(via seasonsoflavieboheme)
“Maturity is knowing what your limitations are. It’s a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”
The Beatles’ first visit to America, 1964, in photos. Complement with the famous lost Beatles photographs taken by their tour manager, Linda McCartney’s tender portraits and Harry Benson’s luminous black-and-white photos of the Fab Four, and their final photo shoot.
