The US Federal Railroad Administration is hoping that a new apparatus it is testing will prevent many of the derailments that take place on US railways every year. The gadget ‘taps’ the tracks with a laser pulse, and listens for echoes to help it locate and identify microscoping flaws in the rails. Similar techniques have been used before, but the current system uses transducers that have to stay in contact with the rails, meaning that the scans have to be done much more slowly.
Baffled yet intrigued by all this talk of quantum computing? Recent advances in the field may have made the arrival of functioning quantum computers much more imminent – Advanced Nanotechnology has a good round-up of links that’ll set you straight, and help you to know your qubits from your cue cards.
Oddball mathematician and science fiction writer Rudy Rucker had a short story he wanted to include in his forthcoming collection, but couldn’t find a magazine market that could print it soon enough – so he decided to start his own webzine, Flurb. Issue number one may be a bit lo-fi on the design front, but it features five stories, of which Rucker’s piece with Paul di Fillipo is the first.
Daisuke ‘Dice-K’ Enomoto, Japan’s would-be first space tourist, has suffered a setback in his plans to see the Earth from orbit – the Russian space agency Roskosmos says Dice-K cannot fly on medical grounds, though they decline to reveal publicly exactly what the issue is, and say that there is a possiblity he may be able to pass a medical in future. I reckon they’re still griping about his garish spacesuit.
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