ScienceIQ.com

A Continent In Deep Freeze

The continent of Antarctica is home to a uniquely beautiful and harsh environment that has changed little in the last 30 million years. The continent, approximately twice the size of Australia, lies mainly within the Antarctic circle and is surrounded by ocean. It is covered almost entirely by a sheet of ice and snow which has an average thickness ...

Continue reading...

AContinentInDeepFreeze
Biology

How Biological Clocks Work

Anyone who has traveled has experienced jet lag—that groggy realization that while your day is beginning in Washington, DC, the night you just left in San Francisco is hardly over. Jet lag is an ... Continue reading

HowBiologicalClocksWork
Astronomy

Catch A Shooting Star

A meteor, sometimes called a 'shooting star,' can be the brightest object in the night sky, yet meteoroids are the smallest bodies in the solar system that can be observed by eye. Wandering through ... Continue reading

ShootingStar
Geology

Salty Remnants At Death Valley's Badwater

Beneath the dark shadows of the Black Mountains, a great, extraordinarily flat expanse of shimmering white spreads out before you. You are at Badwater, at -282 feet it is the lowest spot in the ... Continue reading

SaltyRemnantsAtDeathValley
Astronomy

Venus Is Hot Stuff

At first glance, if Earth had a twin, it would be Venus. The two planets are similar in size, mass, composition, and distance from the Sun. But there the similarities end. Venus has no ocean. Venus is ... Continue reading

VenusIsHotStuff

Quick Change Artist

ChangeArtistThe word transformation means one thing changing into another, like Dr. Jekyl changing into Mr. Hyde. In mathematics, sets of numbers often go through transformations. For example, the numbers representing length and width become a number representing area under one kind of transformation or become perimeter with another. Although most of us can handle that kind of transformation in our heads, there are others that are just as useful but much more complex.

For example, think of wireless communications. If you use a cellular phone, then your service provider keeps track of you and hundreds of other cellular phone users so that your signals can be passed from one antenna to another as you move around. This involves a complicated calculation that's done many times a second by specialized computer chips called digital signal processors(DSPs). The calculation, or transformation, is applied to each row of a table of numbers, row after row, where each row represents a single caller. Since this process takes time, the number of people that can be talking on their phones simultaneously is limited by the speed that the DSPs work. If you've ever gotten a 'network busy' message, then you know that the DSPs have reached their limit.

Recently, a team of engineers and mathematicians produced a computer chip that can operate much faster than DSPs. In fact, part of the calculation is literally at the speed of light. Instead of crunching the numbers for each row individually, the numbers representing up to 256 callers are converted into separate points in a beam of light. The light beam is passed through a special lens that changes it (just the way glasses do). When it comes out on the other side of the lens, it has gone through a transformation that is exactly equivalent to the calculation that used to be performed by a DSP. But this time, hundreds of rows of data have been transformed all at the same time, instead of one at a time. To perform the same number of transformations the old way, you would have to be able to do Tera – that’s 1,000,000,000,000 –operations per second. Try that on an abacus!