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Blog - The One-Way Speed of Light Conundrum and Blog - Is RockMelt the Browser You've been Waiting For?
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There's no dispute over the constancy of the speed of light when measured over a round trip. But what of its speed over a one-way trip?If you had to pick one idea that is emblematic of 20th century physics, a good candidate would be the universal constancy of the speed of light. When Einstein put forward this notion in the special theory of relativity, it solved the long-standing mystery of why measurements did not show any variation in the speed of light with Earth's motion through space.It also ushered in the idea of space-time as a single entity. This leads directly to the derivation of the laws of physics as spacetime symmetries, a process that has been crucial for both general relativity and the standard model of particle physics.So to question the constancy of 'c' is to invite controversy. [Read the full article]
RockMelt, a brand spanking new, Google Chrome-based web browser backed by some Netscape-era heavyweights, is studded with appealing gew-gaws for interacting with your favorite social networks and websites. Basically, it's an attempt to solve the one problem that even HTML5 couldn't rid us of: No matter how good a Web service is, it remains trapped in a tab in your browser.Web tabs are not the greatest way to consume what are essentially streaming media like Facebook, Twitter and all the others sites we refresh multiple times every day. Worse yet, while the Web allows us to have a consistent experience across browsers, few sites retain detailed state information--Twitter on your phone won't remember which tweets you've already read.People who are serious about these mediums are forced to rely on clients--apps built for their operating system that interact with the APIs of these services, pulling down data and making it accessible in custom-built environments. [Read the full article]
Everyone has a unique pattern of eye movements. A new biometric security system exploits this for a simple, hard-to-fool approach.A company in Israel has developed a security system that does just this--exploiting a person's unique pattern of eye movements to identify them. Most biometric security systems measure physical features that are constant, such as fingerprints or iris patterns. An eye-tracking system has the potential to be harder to fool and easier use, its creators say.The new system tracks the way a person's eye moves as he watches an icon roam around a computer screen. The way the icon moves can be different every time, but the user's eye movements include "kinetic features"—slight variations in trajectory—that are unique, making it possible to identify him. This is less complicated than using a long pass phrase or a smart card to gain access to a computer system or a building. [Read the full article]
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