Recently in Computational physics Category

Gizmag: With the rising popularity of "cloud computing"—the sharing of resources, software, and information over the internet—security is a growing concern. To preserve privacy while users interact with remote computing centers, researchers in Austria have combined quantum computing with quantum cryptography in a process called blind quantum computation. According to Stefanie Barz and colleagues, whose paper was published online in Science on 20 January, users prepare qubits in a state known only to themselves. They send the qubits to a quantum computer, which entangles and then manipulates them to execute a particular computation, whose results are sent back to the users. The users' input, output, and algorithms are never disclosed to the company doing the computations, and no eavesdropper can read the qubits without knowing their initial state. The researchers emphasize, however, that their experiment is only one step toward unconditionally secure quantum computing.

Tech and Computer: A new and faster Fourier transform algorithm has been developed by Dina Katabi of MIT and colleagues. The Fourier transform is a method for representing an irregular signal as a combination of pure frequencies. It's used in a wide variety of applications, including nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, image and audio file compression, and the solving of differential equations. The fast Fourier transform (FFT) technique, which was developed in the 1960s, made it practical to calculate Fourier transforms on the fly; it takes a digital signal containing a certain number of samples and expresses it as the weighted sum of an equivalent number of frequencies. Some of the frequencies count more toward the sum than others, and many of the frequencies may have such low weights that they can be safely ignored, which is why the Fourier transform is useful for compression. The new algorithm determines the weights of a signal's most heavily weighted frequencies; the fewer such frequencies in the signal, the greater the increase in speed the algorithm provides.

New York Times: An essential part of an authentic Italian meal, pasta comes in a variety of shapes that are both decorative and utilitarian: The shape of the pasta complements the sauce it is paired with. Recently, the various complex shapes that pasta can take have inspired people to ponder the mathematics involved, writes Kenneth Chang for the New York Times. Sander Huisman, a physics graduate student at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, used Mathematica software to come up with code that would describe such pasta shapes as gemelli and stelline. He was inspired to blog his results as “Pasta visualization” and “Pasta visualization - Part II,” and he even considered doing a mathematical pasta of the month. Architect George Legendre, who was similarly inspired, wrote a book on the subject—Pasta by Design (Thames & Hudson, 2011). Each page spread features a single pasta and includes a mathematical equation, diagram, photo, and suggested sauces to eat it with. In pasta, it would seem, mathematics and art combine in aesthetically pleasing ways.

Nature: At its meeting next January in Geneva, the International Telecommunication Union will decide whether to abandon the leap second. Thus the world's official definition of the time of day would be decoupled from Earth's rotation. First introduced in 1972, the leap second accounts for Earth's slowing rotation rate and ensures that the Sun reaches its zenith over the prime meridian on average at exactly 12:00:00. Unfortunately for time keepers, Earth is spinning down at an erratic, unpredictable rate. Whereas seven leap seconds were added in the 1990s, only two were added in the 2000s. The unpredictability of leap seconds frustrates systems such as navigation satellites that require accurate timing. Indeed, the US GPS doesn't use leap seconds at all. As Zeeya Merali reports for Nature, whether keeping track of leap seconds is a mild inconvenience or a serious problem is a matter of debate. Regardless of how January's vote goes, Earth will continue to spin down. In her story, Merali quotes Peter Whibberley, a physicist at the UK's National Physical Laboratory: "A century down the line, we'll need to introduce a 'leap minute,' and nobody has any sensible arguments for why that won't be a worse issue.”

New York Times: Since the mid 20th century, experts have been exploring the overlap between code breaking and language translation. Recently, one of the world’s most stubborn codes, dating from the 1700s—the Copiale Cipher—was cracked by a team of Swedish and American linguists, who discussed their work at the June meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Oregon. Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden to apply statistics-based translation techniques to the perplexing mix of some 75 000 symbols and Roman letters that make up the cipher. They were able to determine that the first 16 pages are a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society fascinated with eye surgery and ophthalmology. Now Knight is turning his expertise to cracking the 15th-century Voynich manuscript, the so-called white whale of the code-breaking world.

MSNBC: With the use of a powerful supercomputer, a team of researchers has produced the first realistic simulation of the formation of the Milky Way galaxy. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Zürich took advantage of 1.4 million processor-hours on NASA's Pleiades supercomputer, as well as additional supporting simulations at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center. The simulation, which took 9 months, involved tracing the motions of some 60 million particles over more than 13 billion years. According to the research team, the difficulty is in getting the simulations to match up exactly with observations. "Our result shows that a realistic spiral galaxy can be formed based on the basic principles of the cold dark matter paradigm and the physical laws of gravity, fluid dynamics, and radiophysics," said Lucio Mayer of the University of Zurich, coauthor of a paper describing the simulation, to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Daily Mail: Researchers at the UK’s University of Southampton have developed millimeter-sized memory devices made of glass. The team, led by Peter Kazansky at the university’s Optoelectronics Research Center, used ultrashort laser pulses to imprint tiny dots called voxels (like three-dimensional pixels) in pure silica glass. The voxels can then be read using an optical decoder, and users can write or delete data as often as they like. The crystals can store more than conventional hard drives, are less prone to overheating or damage, and can last indefinitely. Since publication of their work in May in Applied Physics Letters, the researchers have developed the technology further and adapted it for a five-dimensional optical recording.

BBC: Volunteers can help the Large Hadron Collider team with the search for new fundamental particles by participating in LHC@home 2.0. Part of the search for the new particles, including the Higgs, involves simulating particle collisions and comparing the results with data from actual collisions at the LHC; home computers are now advanced enough to provide some of the necessary computing power to conduct the simulations. The simulations provide a theoretical reference for the LHC collisions. Discrepancies between the simulations and the collision data most often indicate the need to refine the simulation models or their parameters, but they can also reveal new phenomena that existing theory doesn't account for. Other "citizen science" projects making use of the public's home computers are Folding@home, which studies protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases, and SETI@home, which uses home computers to download and analyze radio telescope data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Chronicle: In a surprise move, IBM abruptly ended its contract with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to provide hardware for building the world’s fastest academic supercomputer. Started in 2007, Blue Waters became more complex and expensive than originally planned, according to officials at IBM. Nevertheless, university officials think they can still finish the computer on time, even without IBM’s unique and innovative Power7 series chips. The university has been given a few weeks to submit an alternate proposal to NSF, which has provided most of the project's funding.

NPR: In the second of a three-part series on China and its efforts to become a technological superpower, Louisa Lim centers on China’s rapid rise in the area of supercomputing. Last November China boasted the world’s fastest machine: the $60 million Tianhe-1A. Although the achievement was short-lived—within six months, Japan came up with one three times faster—China has built 61 out of the top 500 supercomputing sites in the world, making it second only to the US, which has 255. Despite the exponential growth in the number of supercomputers, however, China still faces several challenges, among them its reliance on foreign technology for its processors and a lack of software that can make use of its newfound computing power.

New Scientist: Researchers at Cornell University have developed an algorithm to help robots identify objects in homes and offices. In their system, Hema Koppula and Abhishek Anand used a low-cost Microsoft Kinect sensor, which perceives scenes in three dimensions with two cameras and an IR sensor. Their algorithm uses the data to determine the color and shape of individual objects. The researchers also included instructions to look for certain objects in certain locations; for example, computer monitors are normally found on top of a desk or table, rather than underneath. To find out how the algorithm would perform in a real-world setting, the researchers mounted a Kinect on a mobile robot and asked it to find a keyboard. The robot examined its surroundings, spotted a computer monitor, and moved in for a closer look, knowing that keyboards are often found nearby. The work could revolutionize computer vision, said Daniel Huber of Carnegie Mellon University.

BBC: Nearly all phones that run Google's Android operating system are leaking data used to access web-based services. Many applications installed on the phones interact with Google services by asking for an authentication token—a digital ID card for that application. Once issued, that token stays active and users aren't prompted to log in again for a certain length of time. These tokens are sometimes sent over wireless networks in plain text, which makes them easy to find and steal for anyone eavesdropping on wi-fi traffic. The tokens aren't bound to individual phones or times of use, so they could potentially be used to impersonate a handset anywhere. Bastian Konings of the University of Ulm and colleagues, made the discovery when they investigated how Android phones handle login credentials for web-based services. Google has not yet commented on the loophole uncovered by the team.

New Scientist: Among the systems currently considered to be at risk of a terrorist or military attack are the electrical grid, the air transport network, the banking system, and the internet, writes Mark Buchanan for New Scientist. However, Christian Schneider, a physicist at ETH Zürich, and his colleagues have found that when large technological networks undergo minor changes, which would multiply the paths along which information flows, their security can be greatly improved. The researchers, who have published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used a computer model to study the effects of rewiring a network and found that changing even just 2% of the links in a system could have a huge positive effect. An increase in the number of alternative paths connecting any two points means that the network remains more highly connected even when some key spots get taken out. "This represents a significant step towards a better understanding of how vital networks can be better protected against malicious attacks," says physicist Hernan Makse of the City College of New York.

New York Times: Yesterday Intel announced that it was going three-dimensional in its computer-chip manufacturing. John Markoff for the New York Times writes that Intel has begun making its microprocessors using a new 3D transistor design, called a Finfet (fin field-effect transistor). Intel predicts that the new design—which includes a small pillar, or fin, of silicon that rises above the surface of the chip—will allow the chips to run 37% faster in low-voltage applications, cut power consumption as much as 50%, and make the chip even smaller. While the smallest feature on one of Intel's chips is just 32 nanometers (a human red blood cell is 7500 nanometers wide), "Intel is on track for 22-nanometer manufacturing later this year," said Mark Bohr, an Intel senior fellow. The 3D transistor is seen by some as a gamble, however, because despite its speed, it will not be as ultralow-powered as some chips and therefore not as ideal for smaller devices, such as iPhones and iPads.

New Scientist: A new system in San Francisco not only informs drivers of current traffic conditions but also predicts congestion up to 40 minutes into the future. The initiative is a joint project of IBM, the California Department of Transportation, and the California Center for Innovative Transportation (CCIT) at the University of California, Berkeley. The Smarter Traveler Research Initiative combines real-time traffic data with past traffic patterns to predict backups. "The edge of a traffic jam propagates like a shock wave in a fluid," says Alexandre Bayen at CCIT, and thus follows predictable patterns. The Traffic Prediction Tool software draws data from existing “inductive loop” sensors built into roadways and from the GPS on participants’ smartphones to learn their preferred travel times and routes. Drivers can receive e-mails or text messages that apprise them of traffic conditions on their regular commute and recommend alternative routes. Before expanding the service to commuters worldwide, however, the researchers say it needs more work: The software needs to anticipate the problems that could ensue if too many drivers suddenly change their route and create congestion somewhere else.

New Scientist: Data on a hard drive can now be hidden without the use of encryption, writes Paul Marks for New Scientist. Instead of using a cipher to scramble text, the technique exploits the way hard drives store file data in numerous small chunks, called clusters. Normally the operating system stores the clusters all over the disk, wherever there is free space between fragments of other files. Hassan Khan, at UCLA, and his colleagues have written software that ensures clusters of a file are positioned according to a code rather than being positioned at the whim of the disk drive controller chip. "An investigator can't tell the cluster fragmentation pattern is intentional—it looks like what you'd get after addition and deletion of files over time," said Khan. Such "steganography" avoids the problem experienced with encryption, which can be a "dead giveaway" that someone has something to hide, according to Khan.

BBC: Sensors placed on the outside of the human skull can pick up enough information from the brain beneath to direct, say, a cartoon car around a crude course on a computer screen. But the skull absorbs high-frequency signals that would allow finer, faster control. Now, Eric Leuthardt of Washington University in Saint Louis and his collaborators have shown that sensors placed directly on the surface of a person's brain can be used to move a computer cursor with pure thought, as if the person were using a mouse. The people in the study were epilepsy patients who'd already had the electrocorticographical sensors implanted in their heads. Controlling the cursor entailed asking the patients to think of four vowel sounds. After recording the signals that corresponded to each imagined vowel, the researchers ran a control program that translated the signals into cursor motion.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Fresh from a visit to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Chronicle's Jeffrey Young reports on a growing appreciation among researchers that speed isn't everything when it comes to scientific simulation. Having flexible software architecture is also important, as is ensuring that data can flow quickly among the supercomputer's processors and memory stores. Blue Waters, NCSA's newest supercomputer, might not make it into the top 10 fastest computers, but it incorporates innovative interconnects that can store as well as transfer data. Among Blue Waters' new users is UIUC's Klaus Schulten, who plans to simulate the function of complex subcellular units known as organelles.

NPR: To stay on top of what's going on in the Middle East and South Asia, US political scientists, historians, and even the Pentagon are studying social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and blog posts. Because the posts are written in the local languages, computer translation programs that can not only translate the words but also convey the subtler nuances of sentiment and opinion are being researched. Funded by the Pentagon, a computer scientist at the University of Buffalo in New York, Rohini Srihari, has developed a natural language program that has "learned" the nuances of Urdu—a mix of Hindi and Persian that uses Arabic script and is spoken in Pakistan. According to Srihari, the program can extract factual information as well as positive or negative sentiment and opinion. Although Srihari acknowledges that the program is not perfect, she has gained "insight into what Urdu speakers have been talking about lately," according to Christopher Joyce reporting for NPR.

MSNBC: NASA's inspector general has issued a report saying that the agency-wide mission computer network was vulnerable to potentially "catastrophic" cyberattacks, writes Paul Wagenseil for MSNBC. “Six computer servers associated with IT [information technology] assets that control spacecraft and contain critical data had vulnerabilities that would allow a remote attacker to take control of or render them unavailable,” according to the audit report released yesterday by Inspector General Paul K. Martin. It’s long been known that security on NASA networks is weak, and recommendations from two earlier audit reports have yet to be acted on. In response to the latest report, NASA's management team has promised to implement a strategy for an agency-wide network risk assessment by the end of August and work up a comprehensive approach for identifying and addressing risks by the end of September.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Thanks to web-based tools, one can collect scattered observations and measurements from people living in regions hit by earthquakes, civil wars, and other crises. Other software, known as geographical information systems, can map those measurements and correlate them with other geographically indexed information. The result, as the Chronicle's Marc Parry reports, is that GIS-savvy professors from around the world are teaming up in volunteer networks to produce accurate, current maps of working payphones, blocked roads, and other useful information. The combination of local observations and GIS is proving helpful in the wake of this year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan and in the ongoing civil war in Libya.

New York Times: Yesterday Nintendo introduced its 3DS, the latest version of its popular handheld game machine, but with a new twist—it promises three-dimensional video without the special glasses. According to the review in the KidsPost column of the Washington Post, to create the 3D effect the 3DS uses a system that creates two of the same image on the screen at once—one for the left eye and one for the right eye. This creates a sensation of depth and distance. Users have to hold the screen at a certain viewing distance, but can adjust the 3D settings or turn them off altogether if their eyes get tired. The New York Times’s Seth Schiesel takes the new device out for a spin.

Daily Mail: Scientists in Bristol, UK, have created the first-ever fully working bicycle by printing it from a computer. The bike is made of nylon, which is as strong as steel and aluminum but weighs 65% less. It was designed on a computer and sent to a printer, which placed layers of melted nylon powder on top of each other to build up the machine. Individual components such as gears, pedals, and wheels are usually made in different factories and assembled into a finished bike, but the Airbike is a single, complete part. The technology is likely to be used in industrial applications such as aerospace, the automobile industry, and engineering.

New York Times: Gains in computer power have come from making circuits smaller. But as the wires, transistors, and other circuit components shrink, their electrical resistance—and therefore their power consumption and heat output—rises. The most powerful supercomputers already consume as much power as a small town. To curb that growth, researchers at Hewlett-Packard have proposed a radical reconfiguration of a computer's two basic elements: processor and memory. As the New York Times's John Markoff reports, HP's new configuration mitigates the energy cost of shuttling information between the processor and memory by placing the two elements on top of each other. Another innovation is the use of nanotech devices known as a memristors to serve as memory stores.

New York Times: During the recent turmoil in Egypt, in a span of minutes just after midnight on 28 January, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global internet for a span of five days. Because the internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed that the Mubarak government succeeded in pulling the maneuver off. The event also raised concerns among the worldwide technical community that with unrest coursing through the Middle East, other autocratic governments could follow suit. In the New York Times, James Glanz and John Markoff give an in-depth look at how Egypt disappeared from the internet.

New Scientist: Researchers have built a computer program that can represent atoms and other objects as shapes in four and five dimensions as well as three, and provide new insights into the properties of those atoms. The software turns the shapes into differential equations, then examines the shapes' flow, looking for the unique patterns that signify an atom. Tom Coates, a mathematician at Imperial College London, and his colleagues plan to generate lists of shapes in higher dimensions and then group the shapes in each list according to their properties, much as atoms are grouped in the periodic table of elements. The work could provide insights into string theory and superconductivity.

New Scientist: Artificial intelligence hits prime time this week when a computer squares off against two human opponents on the popular quiz show Jeopardy! Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is one of the most advanced supercomputers to date. In a first-of-its-kind competition, Watson will face two former Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. In a related article, the New York Times’s John Markoff reflects on the subject of artificial intelligence and its history since the dawn of the modern computer era.

Nature: Laying one kind of semiconductor nanowire athwart another kind of semiconductor nanowire creates a tiny transistor. Arranging multiple nanowires in a grid-like fashion creates a device that can perform elementary logic. That's what Harvard University's Charles Lieber and his collaborators have done. Reporting in today's Nature, Lieber describes making and operating "logic tiles" that consist of 496 transistors and measure 960 μm² in area. The tiles' programming ability arises from the crossings' configuration and from the sequence in which the wires are activated.

Scientific Computing: Inspired by the popular confidence trick known as the "shell game," researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have demonstrated the ability to hide and shuffle "quantum-mechanical peas"—in the form of microwave single photons—under and between three microwave resonators, or "quantized shells." In a paper published in Nature Physics, UCSB researchers show the first demonstration of the coherent control of a multi-resonator architecture. That feat has been a holy grail among physicists studying photons at the quantum-mechanical level for more than a decade.

BBC: In a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Peter Falkingham of the University of Manchester and his collaborators explain why fossilized dinosaur footprints are so rare. According to the group's computer simulations, the massive prehistoric animals left enduring prints only in thick, shallow mud. Lighter dinosaurs would not leave prints in the same kind of mud, which means that the absence of small prints next to large fossilized prints should not be taken as evidence for the absence of small dinosaurs.

New Scientist: After spending so long shrouded in a self-inflicted winter of discontent, the much-maligned field of artificial intelligence (AI) is in bloom again, writes Anil Ananthaswamy for New Scientist. Lying close to the heart of AI's revival is a technique called probabilistic programming, which combines the logical underpinnings of the old AI with the power of statistics and probability. "It's a natural unification of two of the most powerful theories that have been developed to understand the world and reason about it," says Stuart Russell, a pioneer of modern AI at the University of California, Berkeley.

New Scientist: A graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Daniel Mellinger, has been posting videos on YouTube of mini helicopters that he has outfitted with advanced software and sensing devices. Mellinger uses quadrotors—helicopters with four rotors, made by German manufacturer Ascending Technologies—and has fitted them with custom microcontrollers, open-source software, and grippers that allow them to hover and pick up and maneuver small payloads. The goal is to make the quadrotors autonomous, which may be a long way off, however, according to another grad student, Abe Bachrach, at MIT.

New Scientist: An automatic driving system—where cars are linked together into a convoy, or “platoon,” and the lead driver has the control—has just been road-tested in Sweden, writes Duncan Graham-Rowe for New Scientist. To join a platoon, a car broadcasts its destination as it drives onto the freeway and a computer system tells the driver of any nearby platoons heading that way. Each car is fitted with a navigation and communication system, which measures the car's speed and direction, constantly adjusting them to keep the car within a set distance of the vehicle in front. Such a system would allow cars to travel more closely together, thus reducing road congestion, and would reduce fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.

Daily Mail: Robert Nay, a 14-year-old boy from Spanish Fork, Utah, recently designed a physics-based puzzle game that has become the top free application on the Apple store. Downloaded as an app by more than 2 million iPhone users since its release on 29 December, Bubble Ball involves moving a small blue ball from one side of the screen to the other by steering it around various obstacles. Nay used Corona tools from Ansca Mobile to write his game, and his mother submitted the apps to the App Store and Android marketplaces.

New Scientist: A noted security researcher, Peter Sommer of the London School of Economics, says we should stop panicking about an impending cyberwar. Coauthor of a report for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, titled Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk, he says online attacks are unlikely ever to have global significance on the scale of a disease pandemic or a run on the banks. A few days earlier, a leading computer industry guru, James Martin, was quoted in the Independent as saying there is ample evidence that hostile foreign agents have already targeted the American electrical grid, and that the effects from such an attack would be devastating and would wreak havoc on the economy. "Governments should take a calm, disciplined approach and evaluate the risks of each type of attack very carefully rather than be swayed by scare stories," says Sommer.

New York Times: The world's most extensive and diverse collection of historical computer hardware has a permanent and newly refurbished home in Mountain View, a town in California's Silicon Valley. Once housed in Boston, the Computer History Museum moved to California in 2000, occupying the office building of a failed dot-com company. The museum has stayed in the building, which has just undergone a major refurbishment. Among the artifacts on display are Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a German World War II Enigma machine, a Cray-1 supercomputer, and a Google server.

Daily Mail: Estonia is recruiting an army of computer experts to defend itself during a cyberwar, almost four years after the country was subjected to a wave of cyber attacks. In May 2007 computer hackers disabled the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, and banks, causing chaos in the small Baltic state. In the years since the attacks, Estonia has mobilized a Cyber Defense League made up of programmers, computer scientists, and software engineers. The league is a volunteer organization that in wartime would function under unified military command.

Daily Mail: An amateur astronomer in the UK has discovered four new planets—without using a telescope. Peter Jalowiczor, a gas worker from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, discovered planets HD31253b, HD218566b, HD177830c, and HD99492 by using two home computers to analyze images released by the University of California, Santa Cruz, as part of the Lick–Carnegie Exoplanet Survey. Jalowiczor, a member of South Yorkshire’s Mexborough and Swinton Astronomical Society, said, “It is an honor and privilege to be listed in the [Astrophysical] Journal and I hope that my work will inspire others.”

New Scientist: A group at the University of Oxford has been working on a system to enable computers to understand human language, reports New Scientist's Jacob Aron. Currently, computers understand sentences only as bunches of words without structure. But Bob Coecke, a lecturer in quantum computer science, and his team used a form of graphical mathematics borrowed from quantum mechanics to encode language and grammar in a set of mathematical rules. The group’s work is to be published in the journal Linguistic Analysis and will be presented next month at the International Conference on Computational Semantics.

New Scientist: Activists hope to construct an alternative to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which controls the internet’s domain name system (DNS)—an internet phone book, in essence. They complain that ICANN takes down web domains at the whim of politicians and industry bosses, if the sites are considered to infringe the law, writes Paul Marks for New Scientist. The proposed registry would initially work like existing systems, but would eventually become a decentralized, peer-to-peer system in which volunteers each run a portion of a DNS on their own computers. By breaking up the internet phone book and hosting it in pieces, they would strip ICANN of its power. Any domain it tries to take away would still be accessible on the alternative registry. According to Ben Laurie, a London-based security consultant and a former technical adviser to WikiLeaks, the alternative internet idea is eminently feasible, but persuading everybody to use it is going to be difficult.

New Scientist: Robots have been “taught” a variety of skills, from mapping their surroundings to picking up cumbersome objects, but not, interestingly, to read. Now a roboticist at the University of Oxford, Ingmar Posner, and colleagues are attempting to do just that. Although optical character recognition software already exists, the difficulty is in getting the robot to recognize text and be able to pick out text in a cluttered environment. So, the team developed text-spotting software. The work was presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Taipei, Taiwan, last month.

New Scientist: Microsoft is developing a way to create temporary bumps, ridges, and other textural features on a touchscreen, writes Paul Marks for New Scientist. The tactile touchscreen works by using a layer of shape-memory plastic to distort the surface of the screen when different wavelengths of ultraviolet light strike the screen's pixels from beneath. Large table-sized computing displays such as Microsoft's Surface are the target application, rather than phones or tablets. "Creating well-defined bumps on a touch surface is in many ways the holy grail of text entry on touch devices because it would enable touch typing at much faster speeds than on touchscreens today," says Patrick Baudisch, a display interaction expert at the University of Potsdam in Germany.

New York Times: A quantum computer, if anyone built one, could carry out certain calculations far faster than any existing supercomputer. Physicists have already created a quantum computer's basic building block, the qubit, from ions, atoms, quantum dots, and other tiny objects. They've also yoked qubits together to make logic gates. The biggest remaining challenge is to "scale up" from logic gates to a working computer. The New York Times's John Markoff reports that IBM Corp has decided to invest in a qubit technology, Josephson junctions, that appears to offer a clear path toward scaling up. Unlike trapped ions and some other qubit technologies, Josephson junctions can be made on chips like integrated circuits.

New York Times: China has built the fastest-ever supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A. It has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, built by the US, as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations. Tianhe-1A's number-one spot is expected to become official on 1 November when Jack Dongarra, the University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings, releases an updated list. For decades the US dominated the technology and built the largest, fastest machines—although Japan briefly took the title away in 2002 with a computer that had more horsepower than the top 20 American computers combined. The US quickly regained the leadership in 2004, and kept it, until now. Supercomputers are used to solve problems in areas critical to national interests, such as defense, energy, finance, and science.

New Scientist: An all-electric spintronic semiconductor device has been created by Paul Crowell of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and his coworkers. Although spintronic personal computers are still a long way off, electron spin is gradually becoming the universal language of computation. Crowell and his team are the first to develop a simple, all-electric method to both generate and detect spin currents within a standard semiconductor. New Scientist’s Kate McAlpine explains the team’s findings; the research has been published in Physical Review Letters.

SPACE.com: The advent of digital photography has caused a dramatic shift in astronomers’ roles. As SPACE.com’s Mike Wall writes, in the past, discovery was the time-consuming part—where astronomers used crude telescopes and pored over photographic plates. Now, new and advanced telescopes are generating more and more data, and astronomers are struggling to keep up. For example, the telescope at the Palomar Observatory in southern California detects 1.5 million candidate transients—fleeting astronomical phenomena—every night. So, astronomers are writing computer algorithms and using projects such as Galaxy Zoo, which enlists the public to help sift through the mountains of data.

Chronicle of Higher Education: South Korea has 17 colleges that offer courses solely online—and not just to Koreans. As the Chronicle's Jeffrey Young reports, the online colleges are increasingly seeking students abroad. Given that South Korea has one of the world's best internet infrastructures, the challenges faced by Hanyang Cyber University in Seoul and the other online colleges are more mundane. To attract international students, the colleges need to offer lectures in English and to be mindful that people in other countries don't have access to the high bandwidths available in South Korea.

New York Times: Google has been working on cars that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software and a variety of sensors. So far, seven test cars have driven 1000 miles without intervention from either the human behind the wheel nor the technician in the passenger seat. Developer Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, believes that robotic cars would lower the nation's energy costs and make highways safer—because robot drivers react faster than humans and don't get distracted, sleepy, or intoxicated.

New York Times: The three-dimensional imaging techniques of the movies are being used to improve athletic performance. Motion capture produces a 3D image on a computer using a combination of advanced sensors, biomechanics, orthopedic research, and animated-film technology such as that used in the film Avatar (2009). The images generated, which can be viewed from any direction, provide a wealth of data regarding limb angles, ball speeds, and g-forces. Some of the innovative uses of the new technology include sports players studying their peak performances to improve their technique and avoid injury, dancers in different locations being able to practice with each other using 3D re-creations, and coaches working remotely with teams by watching them perform drills in three dimensions in another location.

Nature: Solid-state quantum computing moved a step closer to being realized as two research groups report their progress on entangling qubits—or quantum bits—made from superconducting circuits. The groups have achieved three-qubit entanglement, the minimum number needed for quantum error correction. Eugenie Samuel Reich tackles the technical details in her Nature article.

Computerworld: Since its founding as Xerox PARC in 1970, Palo Alto Research Center has been home to several of computing's most important inventions and technological advancements. Thousands of researchers and scientists from a wide range of disciplines have gathered at PARC over the past 40 years, sharing their theories on everything from how computers can better talk to each other to how clean technologies can be used to address critical manufacturing problems.

Computerworld takes a closer look at some of the breakthroughs at PARC that have had such an influential impact on the modern world.

New York Times: Certain materials change their resistance in response to a change in voltage. That simple switching behavior, which arises from the material itself, could form the basis of new, compact computer memory—provided the material is cheap, robust, and convenient to use. In the New York Times, John Markoff reports a recent development toward that goal. Jun Yao of Rice University and his collaborators have built a switch out of silicon dioxide, a bedrock material of current computers whose resistive switching was previously unsuspected. Markoff also reports that an independent team from Hewlett-Packard is set to announce an advance toward the same goal but with a different "memristor" technology.

SPACE.com: Supermassive black holes are thought to lie at the center of almost every galaxy. Contrary to previous research, scientists are now coming to believe that they formed relatively quickly—less than a billion years after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.7 billion years ago. According to Stelios Kazantzidis, an astronomer at Ohio State University, whose team’s results were published today in Nature, black holes may have formed from mergers between giant protogalaxies. Their findings could alter current theories on the evolution of black holes and galaxies; for example, rather than the galaxy regulating the growth of the black hole, as previously thought, it could be the other way round—the black hole regulates the growth of the galaxy.

Computing Now: Two experts in the software systems used to control oil rigs examine the possibility, raised in a congressional hearing in June, that the faulty software either caused or failed to stop the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. Don Shafer, the chief safety and technology officer of the Athens Group, and Phillip Laplante, a professor of software engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, don't reach any conclusions, but their analysis of what could have gone wrong with the calibration and operation of software-controlled alarms is instructive and illuminating.

Science News: Home computers in Iowa and Germany, as part of the Einstein@Home project, recently helped astronomers discover a rare kind of pulsar, one that’s isolated and has a low magnetic field. Einstein@Home uses computer time donated by home and office computer owners to process the mountains of data coming from gravitational wave and radio wave detectors. The computers, onto which programs have been downloaded, process data when not being used for other computer applications. Researchers say that the donated electrical power would cost more than $4 million per year, and the combined computer time can add up to a power greater than a supercomputer. Started five years ago, the Einstein@home program has been downloaded to some 500 000 computers around the world. A paper describing the new pulsar, which has a pulse frequency of 40.8 Hz and is named PSR J2007+2722, appears in today’s issue of Science.

Nature: In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute announced it would give $1 million to whomever solved any of seven difficult math problems. So far, only one of the Millennium Prizes, the Poincaré Conjecture, has been cracked, although the victor, Grigori Perelman, declined the prize money. Now, as Nature's Geoff Brumfiel reports, Vinay Deolalikar, a researcher at Hewlett-Packard, claims he has solved another of the prize problems: Whether one kind of difficult-to-solve computation, NP (for non-polynomial), can be broken down into another, easier-to-solve kind of computation called P (for polynomial). Deolalikar's proof says no.

New Scientist: The latest in computer graphics and animation was on display last week at the SIGGRAPH2010 conference and exhibition in Los Angeles. New Scientist focuses on several of the extraordinary displays at the conference, such as a headset that can make a cookie taste like whatever the wearer chooses through a combination of smell and visual texture.

New York Times: Speech recognition software is now capable of handling routine conversations at doctors' offices and basic interrogations at military checkpoints—even in foreign languages. Steve Lohr and John Markoff of the New York Times survey recent progress toward creating artificial intelligence that can interpret and act on human speech.

Wired: The small inexpensive laptops known as netbooks run on batteries for much longer than do regular laptops. That’s because netbook processors, being less powerful and less versatile, consume less energy. Now, SeaMicro , a startup company in Santa Clara, California, has found a way to exploit the frugality of netbook chips to build small, cheap computer servers. SeaMicro’s solution, as you might guess, is to yoke a large number of the chips—512 in fact—together.

BBC: According to a list released yesterday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, two of the world's ten fastest supercomputers are Chinese. By one theoretical benchmark, the Nebulae machine at China's National Super Computer Center in Shenzhen could even be the fastest.

Nature: In theory, sending quantum-encrypted messages is secure because any attempt at snooping is apparent to the recipient. In practice, the physical systems that encrypt the messages are imperfect. Noise creeps in. Still, until now, physicists had believed that if noise remained below 20%, snooping would be exposed. The University of Toronto's Feihu Xu, Bing Qi, and Hoi-Kwong Lo have devised a method to intercept quantum encrypted communication while remaining below the 20% detection threshold.

Wired: Nintendo Co's popular Wii video game console senses the position of a player's hands by means of strap-on controllers. The controllers in turn rely on tiny built-in accelerometers. Now, a team from MIT has devised what could be a simpler way to interact with a computer: multicolored gloves that the player wears and the computer monitors through a webcam.

Nature News: In 2002, bioinformatician Mark Gerstein and his colleagues set up a server to host some commonly used genomics databases to monitor any anomalies in web traffic or surreptitious scans.

Seven months later, the picture that emerged was one of a network under siege. Not all of these visits were attacks, Gerstein notes, but many were.

Protecting research data presents particular challenges. Most information-technology (IT) professionals suggest ensuring that large or sensitive data stores are managed by a centralized IT team that can monitor and administer systems, keeping a close watch over traffic and limiting access.

But this can conflict with the ethos of researchers who need such systems to be accessed by a wide variety of students, postdocs, and collaborators.

Slate Magazine: Richard Clarke's Cyber War may be the most important book about national-security policy in the last several years, writes Fred Kaplan:

The threat, as the title suggests, is cyberwar, which Clarke—the White House counterterrorism chief under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—defines as "actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation's computers or networks for the purpose of causing damage or disruption."

The militaries of more than 20 nations, including the United States, Russia, and China, have set up special cyberwarfare units. The consequences of such a war, Clarke and his co-author Robert Knake maintain, could "change the world military balance" and "fundamentally alter political and economic relations."

And yet, they persuasively argue, the United States—which has by far the most sophisticated offensive cyberwar capabilities—would almost certainly lose the war, because our economic and military infrastructures are so dependent on computer networks and because we have done so little to protect those networks from a cyberattack.

CNET News: If you're a materials scientist at NASA's Glenn Research Center, or an engineer at the Johnson or Marshall Space Centers studying Space Shuttle flow-control valves, or any one of countless others in the agency needing a supercomputer, there's really just one place to go—the advanced supercomputing facility at the Ames Research Center.

At the center is the sixth-most-powerful supercomputer on Earth, Pleiades, with a current rating of 973 teraflops.

The facility services about 1500 users across NASA, according to Rupak Biswas, the agency's advanced supercomputing division chief.

Pleiades, like most, if not all, supercomputers, is a work in progress. Debuted in late 2008 with a world number 3 ranking and a measurement of 487 teraflops, the machine has now doubled its capacity, even as it has dropped three places in the rankings. Based on SGI's Altix ICE system, the system will continue to grow in the foreseeable future.

Various: Hewlett-Packard scientists last week announced a new advancement in memristors or memory resistors. They were theoretically conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put into practical effect until 2008 at an HP lab.

Memristors are simpler than today’s semiconducting transistors, but can store information even in the absence of an electrical current.

The new breakthrough, published in Nature, is that a memristor can perform logic steps, potentially enabling computation to be performed in chips where data are stored.

Related news pick
Big advance reported in memory chip design

Related links
From lab to fab—An HP Labs discovery demonstrates the viability—and versatility—of memristor technology HP press release
‘Memristive’ switches enable ‘stateful’ logic operations via material implication Nature
HP labs outlines breakthroughs in memristor chip research eWeek
HP sees a revolution in memory chip New York Times

New Scientist: Trying to find remains that have been buried, even animals as large as an elephant or mass graves, is not an easy task. It is made even more difficult when investigators only appear on the scene months or years after such events occur.

One research tool that could potentially help is hyperspectral imaging. This multi-wavelength detector looks for variations in the intensity of light at various wavelengths reflected by vegetation on the ground. The precise pattern of intensities has been found to reflect changes caused by nutrients released into the soil as bodies decompose.

SPACE.com: NASA's new space exploration plan includes a heavy emphasis on robotic missions that would land on the moon, Mars and even asteroids to pave the way for human exploration.

The agency's 2011 budget proposed by President Barack Obama calls for funding two such missions starting next year. One of those missions is a lunar expedition that would test the ability to control robots remotely from Earth, or the International Space Station, on the moon.

NYTimes.com: Blas P. Uberuaga, Xian-Ming Bai, and colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have shown that by altering the microstructure of metals, metallurgists may be able to make nuclear reactor parts that are self healing.

Their conclusions are based on computer simulations of the long-term impact of neutron emissions on copper—not because much copper is used in nuclear plants, but because it is a relatively well-modeled metal.

Cracks in the internal parts of reactors are a big concern both to the nuclear power plant operators (who want to keep maintenance costs low, and any repairs that require shutting the reactor down cost a lot of money), and to regulators (who want to make sure that radioactive material doesn't leak into the environment).

Related link
Efficient annealing of radiation damage near grain boundaries via interstitial emission

Nature: Non-abelian anyons are hypothesized particles that, if found, could form the basis of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. The theoretical finding that they may turn up in three dimensions comes as a surprise.

Related link
Majorana fermions and non-abelian statistics in three dimensions

Physics Today: In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, University of California Berkeley scientists Hugh F. Wilson and Burkhard Militzer have come up with an explanation for why the top layers of Jupiter's atmosphere are severely depleted in helium and neon compared to other protosolar values.

Physics Today: Heat is the bane of computer manufacturers as it places severe limits on how fast computer chips can run. Some computer systems, such as Intel's Pentium desktops, have fans that blow cool air onto the circuit boards. Other solutions, which usually involve supercomputers, include dipping the entire computer in a fast-moving fluid to keep the equipment cool.

But what if we could design a liquid cooling system that could be built onto the silicon chip?

Chunlei Guo and Anatoliy Vorobyev at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester have come up with one technique that could be applied to create such a system.

Their paper in Optics Express describes how to make liquid flow vertically upward along a silicon surface, overcoming the pull of gravity, without pumps or other mechanical devices, through strong capillary action.

It works by carving nanometer-scale structures in silicon, with extremely short, high-powered laser bursts. These grooves increase the attraction or hydrophile that water molecules feel toward the silicon. The attraction becomes so great that it overcomes the strong bond that water molecules feel for other water molecules.

So instead of sticking to each other, the water molecules climb over one another for a chance to be next to the silicon. The water rushes up the surface at speeds of 3.5 cm per second, fast enough to allow any desktop computer chip with this design to run substantially hotter than traditional computer chips.

Related link
Laser turns silicon superwicking

Nature News: If quantum computing networks are ever to become a reality, physicists must find a way to direct and harness the light emitted in quantum experiments without using cumbersome apparatus.

Now Holger Hofmann, at the Department of Quantum Matter at Hiroshima University in Japan, and his colleagues have developed a way to control the direction of light on the nanoscale. Their technique is based on the workings of the Yagi-Uda antenna commonly used to transmit and detect shortwave radio waves.

Science: On 23 September 1966, NASA's Nimbus II satellite soared over Earth in a polar orbit every 108 minutes, taking pictures of cloud cover and measuring heat radiated from the planet's surface. The data documented the extent of polar ice shelves and the paths of two typhoons, but like thousands of other Nimbus II records, the information was originally stored on analog tapes and later forgotten for decades.

Then last month, researchers working out of an abandoned McDonald's restaurant on the grounds of NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, recovered the Nimbus data from that day in 1966, creating a photo mosaic of the globe 43 years ago.

The resulting image (above) is the oldest and most detailed from NASA's Earth-observing satellites. It's also the latest success story in what researchers call techno-archaeology: pulling data from archaic storage systems. Once forgotten and largely unreadable with modern equipment, old data tapes are providing researchers with new information on changes in the surfaces of Earth and the moon.

Related links
Technoarcheology and Earth Sciences, the Recovery of Nimbus II High Resolution Infrared Radiometer Data OnOrbit
Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project
Rescuing NASA's early lunar images Physics Today news picks

Science News: Embracing chaos just might help physicists build a quantum brain. A new study shows that disorder can enhance the coupling between light and matter in quantum systems, a find that could eventually lead to fast, easy-to-build quantum computers.

Related link
Qavity quantum electrodynamics with Anderson-localized modes

The Economist: WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information.

Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space. Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.

ACM Queue: If you were looking for lessons on energy-efficient computing, one person you would want to speak with would be Steve Furber, principal designer of the highly successful ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) processor.

Currently running in billions of cell phones around the world, the ARM is a prime example of a chip that is simple, low power, and low cost.

Furber led development of the ARM in the 1980s while at Acorn, the UK company also known for the BBC Microcomputer, which Furber played a major role in developing.

David Brown interviews Furber about some of the lessons on energy-efficient computing he has learned through working on these and subsequent projects.

Furber also talks about his current project, SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network Architecture), a massively parallel system of a million ARM processors designed to simulate the workings of part of the human brain.

msnbc.com: Supercomputing has helped astrophysicists create massive models of the universe, but such simulations remain out of reach for many in the US and around the world.

To compensate, groups around the world—such as the University of Chicago and CERN in Switzerland—are developing ways in which different research groups can contribute and see the results of supercomputer simulations in real-time by streaming the results over the internet.

One of the first tests of such a system occurred last week in which scientists in Portland, Oregon, watched a Chicago-based simulation of how ordinary matter and mysterious dark matter evolved in the early universe.

BBC News: The world's first large-scale, electronic programmable computer was created to do one job—crack the wartime codes used by the Germans during World War II. Engineers and code-crackers describe life working on Colossus as part of a BBC News series on computer pioneers.

Various: A new study in Science magazine helps explain why the planet didn't warm up dramatically over the course of the past decade, even though the gases that cause global warming increased dramatically.

Scientists have identified a surprising phenomenon in water vapor 10 miles above our heads that explains part of this unexpected pause in warming.

The concentration of water vapor at this altitude has dropped by 10%, triggered by unexplained cooler temperatures at certain high altitudes above the tropics. The study concludes that in the last decade the decline in water vapor slowed the rate of rising temperatures by about 25%, thus partly negating the heat-trapping effect of increasing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

The recent flattening of temperatures since the year 2000 has added credence to climate-change skeptics, who claim that global warming is not happening. This study increases the likelihood that it is a blip, and warming remains a long-term trend. The researchers do call however for a "closer examination" of the way climate computer models consider water vapor.

A number of publications reported the news, including NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian.

Science: Back in the late 1990s, archaeologist Sam Paley of the University at Buffalo in New York was frustrated in his study of the throne room of the 9th century BCE Northwest Palace at Nimrud, the storied Assyrian capital in what is now Iraq, as many artifacts from the room were scattered among many museums.

Then at a conference he heard a presentation by Donald Sanders, a leading proponent of using interactive three-dimensional computer graphics in archaeology, and enlisted Sanders's help.

The pair spent many years getting photographs from museums and successfully built a virtual 3D model of the structure.

The throne room is a classic example of the growth of virtual archaeology, in which archaeologists use computers to re-create the environment and conditions of the past.

The technique is slowly moving into mainstream archaeology.

Wired.com: Researchers have showed the first functional transistor made from a single molecule. The transistor, which has a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts, could behave just like a silicon transistor.

The molecule’s different energy states can be manipulated by varying the voltage applied to it through the contacts. And by manipulating the energy states, researchers were able to control the current passing through it.

The American Natural History Museum: Since 1998, the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium have engaged in the three-dimensional mapping of the universe.

The above movie (best seen in high definition) starts in Earth's atmosphere and pulls out further and further into the cosmos.

The Sun comes into focus, the orbits of the solar system shrink smaller and smaller, the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpio stretch and distort, and, as the Milky Way recedes, the spidery structure of millions of other galaxies comes into view. Then, you reach the limit of the observable universe, the afterglow of the Big Bang.

The movie is based on precise, scientifically accurate observations and research and is part of a new exhibit called Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City which opened on the 11 December.

Last year, some 30,000 people downloaded the Digital Universe—which is based on the same maps—to their personal computers. The software will soon be updated with a more accurate and user-friendly software interface and is available to the public at no cost.

Physics Today: Google is working on developing a quantum computer, announced Google's Hartmut Neven at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2009) in Vancouver, Canada, last week.

Neven, who is the company's technical lead manager for image recognition, gave details of the presentation on the Google research blog.

The reason for Google's interest in quantum computing is speed. As the size of the internet increases exponentially it is becoming harder and harder for Google to maintain the fast speed of the service without having to resort to building massive server farms.

A quantum-based computer could speed up searches dramatically and add a new layer of features to google's existing features, especially on images. As Neven states in the blog:

Assume I hide a ball in a cabinet with a million drawers. How many drawers do you have to open to find the ball? Sometimes you may get lucky and find the ball in the first few drawers but at other times you have to inspect almost all of them. So on average it will take you 500,000 peeks to find the ball. Now a quantum computer can perform such a search looking only into 1000 drawers. This mind boggling feat is known as Grover's algorithm.

The company has spent three years working on quantum adiabatic algorithms with the Canadian company D-Wave providing the hardware.

D-Wave's processors work by magnetically coupling superconducting loops called rf-SQUID flux qubits. "It is not easy to demonstrate that a multi-qubit system such as the D-Wave chip indeed exhibits the desired quantum behavior," says Neven.

At NIPS 2009 Neven demonstrated what google had achieved so far. The company built a detector that has learned to spot cars by looking at example pictures. "There are still many open questions," says Neven, "but in our experiments we observed that this detector performs better than those we had trained using classical solvers running on the computers we have in our data centers today."

Related Links
Primer in quantum algorithms
Training a large scale classifier with the quantum adiabatic algorithm
NIPS 2009 demonstration: Binary classification using hardware implementation of quantum annealing

NYTimes.com: In a speech given just a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007, Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, sketched out an argument that computing was fundamentally transforming the practice of science.

Gray called the shift a "fourth paradigm." The first three paradigms were experimental, theoretical, and, more recently, computational science. He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an "exaflood" of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize, and analyze the data flood.

The Guardian: Walk round the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and sooner or later you'll hear a cry of recognition and someone will say: "I remember using one of those."

It probably doesn't happen often to The Millionaire, a mechanical calculator that went into production in 1893, but Sir Maurice Wilkes spotted it, adding: "We used to have one in the lab. I hope it's still there."

In this case, "the lab" was what became the Cambridge University Computer Lab, which Wilkes headed from 1945 until 1980.

It was where he built Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (Edsac), one of the world's first electronic computers, using sound beams traversing baths of mercury for the memory units.