Nasa takes Twitter to space

In just a few months, astronauts will be able to tweet live from the international space station, according to the Denver Post.

"Nasa is trying to leverage the popularity of Twitter to get its message out," said Kevin Gifford, a senior research associate at the University of Colorado at Boulder's BioServe Space Technologies, a Nasa research centre. "To tweet from space will have a lot of glitz value."

Getting social media into space is a fringe benefit of a new technology that is laying the foundation of an "Interplanetary Internet".

Panasonic has developed a medical robot that dispenses drugs to patients, the Japanese electronics giant's first step into robotics, writes Technology Review.

Panasonic will sell the robot to Japanese hospitals next March and will market it in the US and Europe later. Panasonic spokesman Akira Kadota said the robot will cost several tens of millions of yen (millions of rands).

"This robot is the first in our robotics project. It sorts out injection drugs to patients, saving time for pharmacists," said Kadota.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have recently managed to create an optical transistor from a single molecule in what is yet another important achievement on the road to quantum computing, states Gizmag.

Quantum photonics is a particularly attractive field to scientists and engineers in that it could, once some core issues have been resolved, allow for the production of integrated circuits that operate on the basis of photons instead of electrons, which would in turn enable considerably higher data transfer rates as well as dramatically reduced heat dissipation.

Fibre optics are a typical example of the outstanding data transfer rates of light particles when compared to electrons; however, there is still a need to generate the necessary encoding of the information using electronically controlled switches, which acts as a bottleneck, and slows the process down.