Researchers at Big Blue have created a silicon switch that can direct trillions of bits of data each second within an optical network. This switch would make it possible to put a network with the speed and bandwidth of a fiber-optic telecommunications network inside of a computer.

Within the next decade, engineers expect to build computers with tens, if not hundreds, of processing cores. They have not, however, found a way to get the cores to efficiently communicate with each other, as traditional metal wires are simply not capable of transmitting information at the speeds required. The new silicon switch could be the solution to allowing the cores to communicate with each other in a multicore system.

However, the researchers don’t expect the switch to find its way into commercial computers until five or ten years from now. Hopefully they can find a way to integrate it before we get stuck with slow (well, slow for the time) computers. [via Technology Review]

You know all those movies where space travelers are asleep and don’t age a bit while they fly around the galaxy? They’re in suspended animation, and it turns out that this state may actually be possible.

We don’t know how, but scientists discovered that small doses of hydrogen sulfide (found in sewer gas) put lab mice into a state of metabolic suppression within minutes. The mice were able to return to normal within 30 minutes of being able to breathe regular air again.

The scientists don’t know if this will work on humans, although we doubt any human testing will be performed for a while as this is a dangerous thing to toy with. It would be great to see this finding give humans the ability to enter suspended animation and make long space voyages possible. [via Gizmodo]

Physicists at the University of Maryland have shown that graphene, a sheet of graphite a single atom thick, can conduct electricity at room temperature better than any other known material, including silicon.

Electrons can travel up to 100 times faster through graphene than silicon, making it perfect for the next generation of computer chips and sensors.

But it doesn’t end at that. Graphene also has a smaller resistivity than copper, providing 35% less opposition to the flow of electric current. That would make it the lowest resistivity material as well. However, impurities in graphene make copper better at transferring electrons at the moment. With some refinement, though, we could see graphene overtake copper.

It looks like graphene is just about set to replace silicon in computer chips. The only question left is: where will Graphene Valley be? [via Gizmodo]

Beijing’s Weather Modification Office will be using supercomputers, airplanes, and artillery (and probably a bit of voodoo) in an effort to keep it from raining over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium, nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, in the city this summer.

The process involves three stages. First, the region’s weather will be tracked using satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer. This massive computing power will be able to model an area of 44,000 square kilometers accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each square kilometer.

Then, two aircraft and twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around the city will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds to flush out their rain before they reach the stadium.

Finally, any rebel clouds that manage to survive this bombardment will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that the rain won’t fall until the clouds have passed over the stadium.

It looks as if we’ll see whether humans have finally conquered Mother Nature this summer. We do wonder, though, if this rain-preventing business is bad for the environment. [Technology Review]

Sure, touchscreen phones look great, but when it comes to typing on the touchscreen most of the phones are lacking. Without having the feedback that a keypad provides, users often have to type slowly and frequently make errors on devices such as the iPhone.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow are trying to solve those problems by using actuators (the things that make your phone vibrate when a call comes in) to replicate the feel of a keypad.

Using existing haptic feedback software, the scientists are trying to squeeze more out of the actuators already present in cell phones. Their modifications provide a single pulse for the feeling of a button being clicked, a longer buzz to provide a “rough” feeling when the user has moved to a different key, and a buzz that ramps up and down when sliding a finger across a button to give that button a rounded feel.

The researchers found that users’ typing speed and accuracy were much closer to a standard keypad when using their haptic feedback software. The team will present their findings at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Italy next month, and hopefully we’ll see cell phone manufacturers picking up this software to make their touchscreen phones that much more usable. [via New Scientist]

We’ve seen some wild concept phones before, but this is probably one of the more unique designs of that bunch. The Caps concept cell phone looks like a little tube and features a tiny projector to let you view images and video at a larger scale.

Designed by Jean-Jacques Chanut, Caps features a small, rounded screen with a simple menu that should be easy to navigate via the touchscreen. A pico projector (perhaps this or this one) can show images and movies from one end of the phone, and a headphone jack is on the other side to listen to tunes and movies.

Obviously we’re a ways away from such a small phone, but sometime in the future a little tube like this might be what we’re all using to chat to each other. We do have one question though: how do you talk on the phone? Perhaps sticking it in your ear might do the trick, or maybe it’s only intended to be used with a headset. Another picture after the jump.

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Sun Microsystems has received $44 million in funding from DARPA to work on a way to connect multiple silicon chips using lasers instead of traditional wires.

Wires are a major bottleneck in multi-chip systems today because they slow down the rate at which the chips can communicate. Sun is now aiming to fix that problem by switching out the wires for tiny lasers. The company believes that if successful, the new technology could allow the chips to work up to a thousand times faster.

Unfortunately, Sun is only giving the project a 50% success rate, so we may not be seeing tiny lasers inhabiting our computers any time soon. Hopefully they can get it done though, because as Alan Huang says, “This would be a way of breaking Moore’s Law,” and we’d love to see some blazing-fast computers in the near future. [via New York Times]

Fujitsu has announced a world-record 320GB, 7200rpm 2.5-inch laptop hard disk, the MHZ2 BJ, to be available this June.

If you need the latest and greatest, or are simply running out of space on your current laptop HD and want one that works fast (very, very fast), this is the drive for you. The specs: 10.5 ms read and 12.5 ms write seek times, a 16MB cache, 2.3 W power consumption, and a 25 dB idle noise level.

That’s a lot of storage to fit into such a tiny drive running at these kinds of speeds. Hardware manufacturers are really pushing the limits of these devices, and laptops are quickly catching up to desktops in terms of speed and storage capacity. Advances such as Fujitsu’s new drive show why laptops are quickly beginning to outsell desktops. Hopefully we’ll see all of the major hard drive manufacturer’s follow suit, or even try to beat the new record. [via Engadget]