New ideas on our energy future; hand-held cancer probes; ultra-powerful, high speed quantum computers; and freeing up space on the mobile network.
These stories and more were presented at the national physics and optics conference, AIP/ACOFT 2012, at the University of New South Wales, Kensington.
A West Australian invention that’s keeping atomic clocks accurate, searching for gravity waves, and improving radar systems has won its creators a national physics prize.
And, as mobile networks become increasingly congested, Sydney engineers have designed new technology that can be retrofitted into mobile communication systems to increase their capacity and reduce the cost of mobile calls.
Read on for more stories from the final day of the national physics congress in Sydney.
Posted on behalf of the University of New South Wales
It’s not every day that school students get to present their science project to a major scientific conference, and rarer still to receive a prize for it from a Nobel Laureate.
That’s the happy experience today for a team of four Year 11 students from Gosford High School, who have won a national competition conducted by UNSW and the Australian Institute of Physics.
Quantum computers promise ultra-powerful, high speed number crunching. They’ll help us to search vast databases and model biological molecules at an atomic level. They will crack the encryptions we rely on for banking and online security but also help us make new, unbreakable codes.
How close are we to building a quantum computer? Australian scientists are working on it.
Also at the national physics congress today: meet the man in charge of planning and designing the NBN; designing a cheaper high-precision clock for GPS, astronomy and space tracking; and fighting greenhouse gases and arc-welding fumes with super-heated thermal plasma.
At the national physics congress this week:
And from Fresh Science
Deep under the French-Swiss border, particle physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have been looking for the Higgs boson – a subatomic particle which may or may not exist. [continue reading…]
Science in Public media bulletin 18 October 2011.
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