Solar plane plans 24-hour flight

An experimental aircraft, Solar Impulse, is set to take off from a Swiss airbase in the first attempt to fly around the clock fuelled by nothing but the energy of the sun, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

Solar Impulse is aiming for the aviator's dream of 'perpetual flight' and to prove a point by flying through the night, says the venture's founder, Bertrand Piccard, who was the first balloonist to circumnavigate the globe.

"The great adventure of the 21st century is no longer to go to the moon, because that has already been done, it's about moving society bit by bit away from its dependence on fossil fuels," the Swiss adventurer claimed.

Five young Mexican students have won the second Cisco I-Prize, a global contest to conceptualise an idea that could turn into Cisco's next billion dollar opportunity, states Network World.

The categories contestants have to address with their ideas are: the future of work; the connected life; new ways to learn; and the future of entertainment.

This year's winning team submitted the idea of a 'Life Account' that gathers information about users through connected devices in the physical world and online data in the virtual world.

An international team of researchers has used infra-red laser to obtain precise control of the quantum superpositions of an electron in silicon for the first time, writes Gizmag

This feat marks yet another leap toward the dream of an affordable, fast and reliable quantum computer.

Close to reaching the insurmountable performance wall of conventional electronics, researchers have long been working on a completely different approach to information processing. Should this technology be perfected within the next 15 to 20 years as is expected, quantum computing would allow existing problems to be solved with significantly less operations.