Physicists in Austria and the US have independently demonstrated quantum teleportation with atoms for the first time. Until now, teleportation had only ever been observed with photons. The results could represent a major step towards building a large-scale quantum computer.
Physicists at the KEK laboratory in Japan and the University of Hawaii have proposed a "futuristic but not necessarily impossible technology" that would use an ultra-high energy neutrino beam to destroy nuclear weapons. However, the researchers stress that the method is well beyond the capabilities of current particle accelerators and would require substantial R&D and financial investment by many nations.
A working group charged with charting the next quarter-century of United States particle physics has called for the country to give highest priority to ‘a high-energy, high-luminosity electron-positron linear collider, wherever it is built in the world.’
The anatomy of the Internet allows computer viruses to spread much more effectively than was previously thought, according to physicists in Spain and Italy. Romualdo Pastor-Satorras and Alessandro Vespignani compared the computer network that underpins the Internet with the 'social network' in human populations and found that the Internet lacks a crucial feature - known as the 'epidemic threshold' - that naturally limits the spread of diseases across populations