physical

How technology lifts Pixar's 'Up'

If you want to consider a difficult computational problem, try thinking of the algorithms required to animate more than 10,000 helium balloons, each with its own string, but each also interdependent on the rest, which are collectively hoisting aloft a small house.

That was the challenge the production team at Pixar faced when it set out to begin work on "Up," its tenth feature film, five years in the works, which hits theaters on Friday.

There was absolutely no way the team was going to hand-animate the balloons. Not with their numbers in five-figures, and especially not … Read more

Does the iPhone need a real keyboard?

The other day, as I sat waiting for Jeff Bezos to appear in an auditorium to announce the new Kindle DX, I was surrounded by iPhones. Literally. Two people to my right, two people in front of me, and three people in back of me were all tapping out IMs or e-mails on their iPhones. What struck me was how awkward most of these people looked, tapping away with a single finger, laboring to type sentences just a few lines long.

Now I know some people can type quickly using the iPhone's virtual keyboard. A week earlier I'd … Read more

Nvidia offers 'PhysX' for Sony PlayStation 3

Updated on March 18 at 8:00 p.m. PST with additional information throughout.

Nvidia on Tuesday said it has signed a license agreement with Sony to provide PhysX technology for the PlayStation 3, whereby Nvidia becomes the official tools and middleware provider for Sony PS3.

Nvidia's PhysX technology--based on the laws of physics--enables game objects to respond in a realistic way to physical events. More conventional technology uses a canned response, in which the same response is repeated over and over.

For example, a window breaks, or a person falls the same way every time. In a … Read more

Why the LHC may be beaten to the Bang

The Big Bang was supposed to have happened last year.

Then the Large Hadron Collider blew a fuse that had been wired by a couple of teenagers from Turkmenistan (I'm kidding. They were actually from the backstreets of Vilnius.) and had to be shut down for major repairs.

Meanwhile, it seems, physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., have been tinkering with their Tevatron.

The Tevatron doesn't have the scale of the Large Hadron Collider. But it does seem to have one small advantage: it's actually working. Yes, those beams of protons are smashing … Read more

One small step for a man, one giant leap for teleportation

We've still got a long way to go before human beings can be beamed from one place to another Star Trek-style, but on Friday a team of scientists at the University of Maryland achieved, nonetheless, a milestone in teleportation.

According to LiveScience, the university's Joint Quantum Institute for the first time was able to teleport information between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter--about one step for an adult.

Generally, teleportation works thanks to a remarkable quantum phenomenon called entanglement that only occurs on the atomic and subatomic scale. Once two objects are put in an … Read more

EA, Take-Two lift Nvidia physics to next level

Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive Software are adopting Nvidia's PhysX technology, bringing more realistic gaming to the PC.

The largest graphics chip supplier is announcing on Monday that Electronic Arts and Take-Two have licensed its PhysX technology as a development platform.

"PhysX is a great physics solution for the most popular platforms, and we're happy to make it available for EA's development teams worldwide," Tim Wilson, chief technology officer of EA's Redwood Shores Studio, said in a statement.

"We are very impressed with the quality of the PhysX engine, and we licensed it … Read more

Squishy driving

JellyCar is an inventive and whimsical free game in which you drive a bouncy car through a series of 2-D puzzles on 15 short levels. What makes JellyCar unusual (besides its goofy soundtrack) is the game's "soft-body physics," which make your car and everything in the game world extremely squishy and reactive. The fairly simple controls make great use of the touchscreen--you can drive left and right, temporarily "inflate" the size of your car, tilt your device left and right to rotate the car, and pinch and zoom to change your view of a level. … Read more

A rock star tries to understand his world-famous physicist Dad

I'm not in the habit of watching PBS or science programs. I am not smart enough and I'm always afraid PBS will ask me for money.

However, last night, as part of its Nova series, PBS showed an extraordinary documentary entitled Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. It featured, Mark Everett, better known as E, the lead singer of the indie/alternative/just plain very, very good band EELS.

As a child, his father didn't talk to him very much. He didn't hug him at all. In fact, pretty much the first time Mark had any physical contact … Read more

At CERN, computers to tackle the Big Bang

GENEVA--The CERN Computer Center is the number-crunching hub that powers the physics research lab's quest to discover the nature of the universe.

A formidable 8,000 servers housing 40,000 Intel processor cores provide the grunt to help crack the petabytes of data spewed out from CERN's cutting-edge particle accelerators, based here. Editors' note: This story was originally published on Silicon.com as a photo gallery. Click here to see all the images.)

About half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will generate about 15 petabytes … Read more

'60 Minutes': Inside the Collider

Build an $8 billion machine that forms a 17-mile circle 300 feet underground and that may reveal secrets from the origins of the universe, and you're bound to provoke curiosity.

The machine in question is the Large Hadron Collider, the goal of which is to reproduce the conditions from just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. It'll do so by slamming together subatomic particles at about the speed of light, with scientists poised for a glimpse at the results.

In Sunday night's season premiere of the CBS news program 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft talked to … Read more