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(PhysOrg.com) -- A group of physicists working out of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have succeeded in proving what was until now, just theory; and that is, that visible photons could be produced from the virtual particles that have been thought to exist in a quantum vacuum. In a paper published on arXiv, the team describes how they used a specially created circuit called a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) to modulate a bit of wire length at a roughly five percent of the speed of light, to produce visible "sparks" from the nothingness of a vacuum.

Aaron O'Connell and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did not actually produce a cat that was dead and alive at the same time, as Erwin Schrödinger proposed in a notorious thought experiment 75 years ago. But they did show that a tiny resonating strip of metal - only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope - can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time. Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very act of observation would take it out of superposition.

Geo-targeting has become a primary choice of advertisers that give them a way to reach out the right audience. You can reach to your potential customers from any particular location that also helps you achieve greater brand visibility.

Jesse Sullivan, the man in this video, is using one of the most high-tech prosthetic arms available. But what's truly impressive about it isn't visible to the eye: instead of using a motor, he's controlling the arm with his thoughts. After an amputation, the nerves in a stump remain healthy, at least for a while, and now scientists are making use of this fact to create highly dexterous, thought-controlled prosthetics.

A startup called Quid has developed algorithms that analyze Internet-based data from corporations to make fast-moving technology developments visible, navigable, and understandable. Quid has built a data set combining information about firms that succeeded and sank, patent documents, government grants, help wanted advertisements, and tweets. Its algorithms use the collection of information to analyze the prospects of around 35,000 firms and research groups working on new technologies. By extracting words and phrases from the collected documents, Quid constructs a "technology genome" that describes the primary focus of each of those 35,000 entities. A map of the connections between those genomes can be used by investors to find hints about interesting companies or ideas. Most companies cluster around established sectors, but a few will sit in the white spaces between the clusters and can represent the seeds of new technology sectors.