Futurehead.com

It's been a long time coming. While Arthur C. Clarke's satellites have taken to space, and James Bond's futuristic mobile technology has become common place, still the dream of sustained personal flight has eluded us. But the future is here! Finally we can all take flight as Martin Aircraft in New Zealand releases the first commercially-available jet pack!

Like many science fiction concepts, the jetpack design has become firmly entrenched in the collective psyche: ask anyone to draw you a jetpack and they will give you a man with two fiery pods strapped to his back gravitating him skyward. We owe much of this to James Bond's Thunderball, which served to advertise the most successful of all the jetpack inventions; the Bell Rocket Belt.

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Physicists have come up with a way to process information faster than the speed of light. But what could they do with such a hypercomputer?

The speed of light represents one of the fundamental limits of the laws of physics. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, right?

Well, yes and no, say Volkmar Putz and Karl Svozil at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria. They say there are several ways that signals can cross the superluminal line, although none of them allow the kind of time travel paradoxes beloved of science fiction writers. For example, the quantum phenomenon of entanglement occurs when two quantum particles are described by the same wave function. These particles can be separated by the diameter of the universe and yet a measurement on one will instantaneously influence the other.

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With one bottle of drinking water and four hours of sunlight, MIT chemist Dan Nocera claims that he can produce 30 KWh of electricity, which is enough to power an entire household in the developing world. With about three gallons of river water, he could satisfy the daily energy needs of a large American home. The key to these claims is a new, affordable catalyst that uses solar electricity to split water and generate hydrogen.

Using the electricity generated from a 30-square-meter photovoltaic array, Nocera’s cobalt-phosphate catalyst converts water and carbon dioxide into hydrogen and oxygen. The process is similar to organic photosynthesis, except that in nature, plants create energy in the form of sugars instead of hydrogen.

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Professor Vlatko Vedral is a quantum physicist at the universities of Oxford and Singapore who grapples with the behaviour of energy and matter at subatomic scales, and this has led him to ask some bigger questions including why are we here? And what does it all mean? The 39-year-old, originally from Belgrade, passionately believes units of information – not particles – are the building blocks of humanity and everything that surrounds us. Information, he maintains, is what came before everything else. It is akin to God.

Vedral has set out his argument in a new book, Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information (OUP), in which he explains faith, love and teleportation.

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Today, computers can't reliably identify the objects in digital images. But if they could, they could comb through hours of video for the two or three minutes that a viewer might be interested in, or perform web searches where the search term was an image, not a sequence of words. And of course, object recognition is a prerequisite for the kind of home assistance robot that could execute an order like "Bring me the stapler." Now, MIT researchers have found a way to improve object recognition systems by using information about context. If the MIT system thinks it’s identified a chair, for instance, it becomes more confident that the rectangular thing nearby is a table.

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