Research from UC Berkeley’s Kater Murch and team has allowed fine observation of a quantum waveform collapse. Observing single quantum trajectories of a superconducting quantum bit , published in Nature , describes the experiment, which used indirect observations of microwaves that had passed through a box containing a circuit where a particle was in a state of superposition, allowing the researchers to view the collapse in slow-motion.
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Researchers get slo-mo footage of the collapse of a quantum waveform
An anonymous reader writes “Tom’s Hardware has published a lengthy article and a set of benchmarks on the new “Haswell” CPUs from Intel. It’s just a performance preview, but it isn’t just more of the same. While it’s got the expected 10-15% faster for the same clock speed for integer applications, floating point applications are almost twice as a fast which might be important for digital imaging applications and scientific computing.” The serious performance increase has a few caveats: you have to use either AVX2 or FMA3, and then only in code that takes advantage of vectorization. Floating point operations using AVX or plain old SSE3 see more modest increases in performance (in line with integer performance increases). Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
February 22, 2013, marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Babylon 5: The Gathering , the pilot film for what would eventually become the Babylon 5 television series. The show arguably changed the way narrative television works, and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski also changed the rules for TV creators by actively engaging his fanbase online during the show’s production. More »