Knowledge Bytes ! !

This illustration shows the dual nature of light, which acts like both particles and waves. In a new experiment reported in November 2012, researchers observed light photons acting like both particles and waves simultaneously. Is light made of waves, or particles? This fundamental question has dogged scientists for decades, because light seems to be both. However, until now, experiments have revealed light to act either like a particle, or a wave, but never the two at once. Now, for the first time, a new type of experiment has shown light behaving like both a particle and a wave simultaneously, providing a new dimension to the quandary that could help reveal the true nature of light, and of the whole quantum world. The debate goes back at least as far as Isaac Newton, who advocated that light was made of particles, and James Clerk Maxwell, whose successful theory of electromagnetism, unifying the forces of electricity and magnetism into one, relied on a model...

- We made you ‘cause we could. - Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator? In Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s film about a space expedition searching for the origins of human life, the elegant, Lawrence-of-Arabia loving android David discovers from a crew member the possible motives behind his own creation – and understandably finds this less than inspiring. But the idea of creating intelligent robots has fired human imagination for decades. These robots have taken many forms in speculative fiction, from the seductive charms of Futura in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis to the urbane, existential angst of David in Prometheus. In reality, though, how far have we progressed towards being able to create an intelligent robot just “’cause we could”? To understand where we are now, we have to go back about twenty years, to a time when artificial intelligence research was in crisis. Rodney Brooks, then a professor of Elec...

NASA's $2.5 million Robonaut 2 is the first humanoid ever to fly in space. The robot currently lives on the International Space Station, where astronauts wll test its ability to help with complex tasks both inside and outside the orbiting laboratory. Take a look at how Robonaut 2 works in the SPACE.com infographic above. Like Techmailers and  follow  on  Twitter ,  Facebook ,  Pinterest  for more mails and updates.

And that's no dig at Google, according to artificial intelligence researchers Yann LeCun and Josh Tenenbaum. The two spoke at the World Science Festival in New York City after the premier of "The Creator: Alan Turing and the Future of Thinking Machines," a trippy arthouse film about 1940s and 1950s artificial intelligence visionary Alan Turing. The galactic encyclopedia we know as Google is brilliant in many ways — for the amount of information it can absorb and shoot back in response to virtually any kind of question. Still, "It's rote learning; there's no understanding," said LeCun, a professor of computer and neural science at New York University. In terms of computational ability, even the most-powerful computers in the world are just approaching that of an insect, according to LeCun. "I would be happy in my lifetime to build a machine as intelligent as a rat," he said. And some of the seemingly amazing things that Google can do, ...

Jobs these days are incredibly difficult to find. Perhaps that's why many people are now looking into making jobs for themselves; self-employment in other words. Indeed, you'd be lucky to even find a decent paying office job these days. And even luckier if you could get one in your home city near your own home. That's more or less a thing of the past now. And the reason for that is, competition has grown up, while the number of jobs hasn't. Also, there's a somewhat lack of efficiency in the process of finding a job. Not everyone gets a job they are best suited for. The solution then, is a good platform that can connect all the relevant people. Fortunately, there are many, but here, we will talk about the best 10 such job websites worldwide. These websites will help you find a job, and make a better living,   online   or otherwise. Before starting, I want to point out one thing. There are some freelancing we didn't mention here because we covered them i...

 If James Bond logs on to a computer, he doesn't want to leave a bunch of files, cookies, or his IP address out there for someone to find. It might seem extreme, but sometimes it's a good idea to take the same precautions yourself.In this post, we'll walk through how to use a USB stick or DVD to anonymize, encrypt, and hide everything you do on a computer no matter where you are. When we say "browse without leaving a trace", we truly mean it. Using the Linux-based, live-boot operating system Tails (The Amnesiac Incognito Live System), you can use any computer anywhere without anyone knowing you were ever on it. Tails is a portable operating system with all the security bells and whistles you'll ever need already installed on it. You can install Tails on one of your many dust-gathering USB drives or a DVD. We'll show you how to set up your own portable boot disc in the second section, but let's start by taking a look at what you get with Tails. Wh...

Microsoft is revamping its search engine and exploiting the growth of social networking online. In an effort to make searching on the Web simpler, faster, and more social—and further differentiate itself from market leader Google—Microsoft's Bing search engine is getting a new look. On Thursday, Bing said it will roll out a new design over the next few weeks that trades in its existing search results page format—a mix of images and various types of text-based results on a one-column page—for a layout in three separate panes featuring traditional text results, results from specific information sources and services, and results related to your social-network friends. At an event to unveil the refresh in San Francisco on Thursday, Derrick Connell, Bing's corporate vice president of search program management, said Bing's search results page needed to evolve. "If we don't evolve our search result pages, in the industry we'll eventually become o...

Engineered viruses are being used to convert the tap of a finger into electricity. The advance could lead to paper-thin generators. Researchers are putting viruses to work in the lab, using them to build tiny devices that gather energy from mechanical forces, like the press of a finger, to run a small liquid-crystal display "More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics," study researcher Seung-Wuk Lee, at the University of California — Berkeley, said in a statement. These first steps could lead to a device that could work as a paper-thin generator. This generator could be embedded in the sole of your shoe, making energy and charging your phone as you walk, because harmless viruses are converting mechanical energy into electricity. The scientists tested their approach by creating a generator that works ...