Information Technology

That bar code on your cereal box holds information read by a laser scanner. It’s not much information, but it’s enough to let the supermarket take your money, keep track of inventory, follow trends in customer preference, and restock its shelves. Scanners and bar codes speed up checkout, but they’ve got a few limitations. The scanning laser needs a direct line of sight to the bar code, and the bar code itself needs to be reasonably clean and undamaged – one reason your cashier might ha

Researchers at Oregon State University have made a significant breakthrough in the technology to produce crystalline oxide films, which play roles in semiconductor chips, flat panel displays and many other electronic products.

In a report to be published Friday in the journal Science, the OSU scientists explain a way to create these crystalline thin films at temperatures far lower than those used currently, and with no need to be produced in a vacuum as the current technology usually requir

New parallel library allows maximum performance for communication networks

A new message-passing library that makes it possible to extract optimum performance from both workstation and personal computer clusters, as well as from large massively parallel supercomputers has been developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. The new library, called MP_Lite, supports and enhances the basic capabilities that most software programs require to communicate bet

Hackers who try to use or copy software illegally may soon find a sticky web waiting to trap them.

It’s not the World Wide Web. Instead, it’s a new approach under development at Purdue University designed to protect software. By placing a linked brigade of hundreds of tiny “guards” at different points within software code, computer scientists have made it far more difficult for hackers to use software without permission from the vendor.

“Merely cracking a single p

Digital images that have been tampered with could now be spotted – thanks to a digital ‘watermark’ developed by UK scientists

Digital images such as CCTV footage are increasingly being used as evidence in high profile court cases. However, it is easy to tamper with an image and very difficult to tell if any manipulation has taken place.

Researchers have created a digital version of a watermark to tackle this problem and validate digital evidence. The team is led by Profes

Researchers at the University of Toronto have discovered a new technique to form tiny perfect crystals that have high optical quality, a finding that could usher in a new era of ultra-fast computing and communication using photons instead of electrons.

These crystals, called photonic crystals, could greatly improve both speed and bandwidth in communications systems, says University Professor Geoffrey Ozin of the Department of Chemistry.

“All of the promises of what photonic crysta