A major hurdle in the ambitious quest to design and construct a radically new kind of quantum computer has been finding a way to manipulate the single electrons that very likely will constitute the new machines' processing components or "qubits." Princeton University's Jason Petta has discovered how to do just that -- demonstrating a method that alters the properties of a lone electron without disturbing the trillions of electrons in its immediate surroundings.

A team of quantum physicists has taken the first steps towards using a quantum computer to predict how a chemical reaction will take place.

The internet and other communications networks could use one-ten-thousandth of the energy that they do today if smarter data-coding techniques were used to move information around according to new research.

In a recent talk, Jonathan Zittrain argues that crowdsourcing technologies have the potential to be used by repressive governments to aid in government surveillance.

A new book of essays explores the emerging fourth paradigm of science, which is partly a response to the flood of data generated by the last paradigm shift: computational science. The new generation of researchers are creating new computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood and in the process fundamentally transforming the practice of science.

By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers. Instead, users will open documents and surf the Web using nothing more than their brain waves.

The falling price of supercomputers and rising prominence of "cloud computing" is pulling down the high walls around computing-intensive research. A result could be a democratization that gives ordinary people with a novel idea a chance to explore their curiosity with heavy computing firepower — and maybe find something unexpected.

The race is on to make supercomputers as powerful as possible, exascale-class computers capable of a million trillion calculations per second, to solve some of the world's most important problems, including climate change, the need for ultra-long-life batteries for cars, operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius and creating bio-fuels from weeds and not corn.

HP Labs has announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE): a R&D program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of tiny accelerometers that detect motion and vibrations, and later, ones for light, temperature, barometric pressure, airflow and humidity.

Jamais Cascio warns that augmented reality technologies could be misused to further the already crippling levels of political polarization in society.