Once it’s built, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will be the world’s largest radio telescope and an enormously powerful tool to probe the furthest depths of the universe, allowing us to look back some 13 billion years. However, the SKA doesn’t even have a home yet and won’t be fully operational until 2024. Despite that, researchers are already concerned about the enormous quantity of data — double the daily output of the Internet — the telescope will produce each day. Enter IBM, the grand-daddy of computing power, to develop a solution.

One of the main problems with conventional wireless signals is that they can be obstructed, and pretty easily at that. You can very, very rarely get cell service in a subway, and sometimes just being inside a building can make things difficult. Unlike radio waves however, neutrinos can power through just about anything, making them a great potential vehicle for wireless communications. Now, the first ever neutrino beam message has been sent, and it was delivered through 240 meters, 262 yards, or 787 feet of solid stone.

Japanese chip maker Rohm announced yesterday that they had cracked the 1.5 gigabits per second wireless data transmission speed with their new 2cm long chip. The chip uses terrahertz wave transmission to achieve such incredible speeds, which utilizes the portion of the spectrum between infrared and microwave. Amazingly, these super fast transmitters may actually be cheaper to build than current models.

Perhaps more enticing is that the company believes that they can not only bring the chips to market in three to four years, but that 30 Gbps speeds are in our future.

Intel turned some heads at a recent conference on supercomputing in Seattle when it announced Knights Corner, a single chip capable of one teraflop performance and uses 50 separate cores to pull it off. Intel claims that this new chip will deliver faster, more accurate results when performing calculations.

In an interesting move, Verizon has announced plans to release a turbo button API to app developers. Once in place, it would allow users to press a button on their screen that allegedly provides more bandwidth to help take the edge off those data-hungry apps, or pick up the slack when data networks are congested. Unfortunately, it will come at a cost in the form of microtransactions handled by Verizon. 

As you may remember, AMD took the world record for CPU overclocking a little over a month ago. Using their 8-core Bulldozer-FX chip, the team was able to set the all time record of 8.429 GHZ in an utterly theatrical manner. It wasn’t exactly a piece of cake; the event involved all kinds of unorthadox measures including liquid nitrogen and liquid helium cooling. No way some random guy could top that, right?

Wrong. Andre Yang of Taiwan has managed to best the two-months-young record, driving his own personal AMD FX-8150 eight-core up to 8.46GHz, presumably without all the colored lights, a thumping soundtrack, or high production values.

The National Institute of Information and Communications in Tokyo has achieved a world speed record of sending 109 terabits per second over a single fibre optic cable. The cable the team used contained a single fiber with seven “light-guiding cores,” whereas a regular fiber optic cable contains a single core. Each core managed to carry 15.6 terabits per second.

The marital spat between Netflix and the Internet service providers (ISPs) that support the popular video streaming and rental service has been strained for some time. Maybe Netflix hadn’t been doing the dishes, or they were having some trouble in the bedroom, but ISPs took it to another level when they accused Netflix of clogging up the Internet with their instant view streaming service. Netflix has now responded by vowing to release the information it gathers on ISP speeds every month from their blog. It’s the equivalent of your significant other announcing that they have compiled a list of everything you have done wrong, and will be telling all your friends.

What this means to consumers is that they finally have a carefully compiled report card for their ISPs, who do not generally release this kind of information. While everyday Internet users like you and me can use online tools to find out their individual speeds, that data has never been available in such a comprehensive manner, nor from so large a data set.

Of course, it all comes back to money. Netflix and a middleman company Level 3 are currently being asked to pay quite a bit more to push data through to customers, which Netflix believes is violating the spirit of Net Neutrality.  In addition to the passive aggressive move of posting this information, Netflix has also aired their grievances with ISPs in a letter to the company’s shareholders. From the Washington Post:

On Wednesday night, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings waded into the debate for the first time, writing in a letter to shareholders that it is “inappropriate” for ISPs to charge more for traffic to reach customers. Hastings said that even if 20 percent of all peak bandwidth is used by Netflix streaming video, the firm is paying for its traffic to reach ISPs who then deliver traffic to homes. Cable and telecom firms are using their exclusive access to customers to unfairly charge networking partners more, the firms said.

Right now, Netflix looks like the underdog. Consumers love paying next to nothing to watch movies whenever they want, and hate to pay through the nose to their ISPs. It’s a bold move on Netflix’s part to play to that discontent and give users information on exactly how well their ISPs are performing. Of course, Netflix stands to make a lot of money by keeping their operating costs low, and avoiding having to raise user costs. Whether a sincere devotion to the free and open premise of Net Neutrality is really at work here is yet to be seen.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to watch Cool World on Netflix. Just because I can.

(via Lifehacker and CNN Money)

For as long as Wi-Fi has been around, its proponents have wanted to make it better, faster, and longer-range, but that process has been complicated by the physical realities of the radio standard: Current U.S. regulations limit its transmission to the 2.4 GHz band. (Gizmodo explains this further in a nifty article on why so many wireless gadgets are clustered at 2.4 GHz.) But after September 23rd, that may change: On that date, the FCC plans to vote on a set of rules allowing for a “super Wi-Fi” that’s transmitted over the unused airwaves between broadcast television channels and which could potentially “travel several miles and deliver Internet speeds ranging from 15 to 20 megabits per second – as fast as a cable modem.”