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In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute. It sounds weird and it is. The reason for wanting to hold light in its place (aside from the sheer awesomeness of it) is to ensure that it retains its quantum coherence properties (i.e. its information state), thus making it possible to build light-based quantum memory. And the longer that light can be held, the better as far as computation is concerned. Accordingly, it could allow for more  secure quantum communications  over longer distances. Needless to say, halting light is not easy — you can't just put in the freezer. Light is electromagnetic radiation that moves at 300 million meters per second. Over the course of a one minute span, it can travel about 11 million miles (18 million km), or 20 round trips to the moon. So it's a rath...

Everyone loves a good road movie, whether it's Hope and Crosby or Fonda and Hopper. But the scope of those films pales in comparison to the ground covered by the Hayden Planetarium's new video, The Known Universe . The video starts in Tibet and zooms out through time and space until it shows well, the entire known universe. The video, created for the new Rubin Art Museum exhibit Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe , uses over a decade of data collected by researchers at the planetarium. Called the Digital Universe Atlas, the data encompasses the precise location of every object ever observed in the sky. From quasars to pulsars to black holes to nebulas, it's all there. The observable universe spans 13.7 billion light years, with the background radiation aftershock of the Big Bang as the oldest, and farthest, signal. At that end of the universe lies the oldest material in creation, which, thanks to billions of years of expansion, has accelerat...