Self-driving cars which eliminate traffic jams, getting a healthcare diagnosis instantly without leaving your home, or feeling the touch of loved ones based across the continent may sound like the stuff of science fiction. But new research, led by the University of Bristol and published today in the journal Nature Electronics, could make all this and more a step closer to reality thanks to a radical breakthrough in semiconductor technology. The futuristic concepts rely on the ability to communicate and transfer vast volumes of data much faster than existing networks. So physicists have developed an innovative way to accelerate this…

The effect varies for different people. Take a moment and look at this. Some people don’t see anything special: just a blue iris in a red eye. Image: CC-BY Tom Stafford 2022 For me though, there is an incredibly strong depth illusion – the blue and the red appear as if they are at different distances. I can enhance the effect by blinking rapidly, turning the brightness up on my screen and viewing in a dark room. Sometimes it disappears for a few seconds before snapping back in. Because the colours appear at different depths they even appear to glide…

While doing a literature review earlier this spring, a human factors researcher came across a paper he had peer-reviewed. One problem: He had reviewed it – and recommended against publishing – for a different journal not long before the publication date of the paper he was now looking at.  Based on the published paper and documents shared with us, it appears the authors submitted the same manuscript to the journals Applied Sciences and Virtual Reality within 11 days of each other, and withdrew one version when the other was published.  And after we reached out to the authors, the lead…