Physicists have come up with a way to process information faster than the speed of light. But what could they do with such a hypercomputer?

The speed of light represents one of the fundamental limits of the laws of physics. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, right?

Analyzing the connections between sites could help spot Web attacks.

Over the past couple of years, cybercriminals have increasingly focused on finding ways to inject malicious code into legitimate websites. Typically they've done this by embedding code in an editable part of a page and using this code to serve up harmful content from another part of the Web. But this activity can be difficult to spot because websites also increasingly pull in legitimate content, such as ads, videos, or snippets of code, from outside sites.

Chemical process can recycle PET bottles at lower temperatures.

A plastic bottle tossed in the recycling bin may end up being shredded and reused to make a sweater or a carpet, but it won't be turned into another water bottle. At least not so far. Catalysts being developed by researchers at IBM and Stanford could make it cost-effective to break down polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, plastics into their constituent chemicals for reuse as bottles. The company is working to test its PET-recycling catalyst at a large scale to eventually develop it for industrial use.

Genomics pioneer Leroy Hood says a coming revolution in medicine will bring enormous new opportunities.

Leroy Hood has been at the center of a number of paradigm shifts in biology. He helped to invent the first automated DNA sequencing machine in the 1980s, along with several other technologies that have changed the face of molecular biology. And in 2000, he founded the Institute for Systems Biology, a multidisciplinary institute in Seattle dedicated to examining the interactions between biological information at many different levels, and to moving forward a new perspective for studying biology. The next revolution he plans to help shape is in medicine, using new technologies and new knowledge in biology and informatics to make its practice more predictive, preventative and personal.

The ADHD drug improves attention by enhancing neural plasticity.

New research in animals sheds light on how Ritalin, the stimulant drug prescribed to millions of children each year in the United States for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), sheds light on how the drug works. The molecule appears to boost both attention and enhance the speed of learning by increasing the activity of the chemical messenger dopamine, according to new research in Nature Neuroscience.

Companies are working to add value to geospatial information.

Thanks to smart phones and other mobile devices, the number of applications that make use of geolocation data is exploding. But developers and device makers face new challenges that include determining physical location accurately, turning coordinates into meaningful information, and protecting users' privacy.

A novel fuel-injection system achieves 64 miles per gallon.

Transonic Combustion, a startup based in Camarillo, CA, has developed a fuel-injection system it says can improve the efficiency of gasoline engines by more than 50 percent. A test vehicle equipped with the technology gets 64 miles per gallon in highway driving, which is far better than more costly gas-electric hybrids, such as the Prius, which gets 48 miles per gallon on the highway.

A startup promises a painless way to move existing software.

It's one thing to design and build software to live in the cloud from scratch. It's something else to move existing applications over to cloud-computing platforms, which many companies need to do. This often means completely rewriting parts of the code to make it compatible with a particular provider's infrastructure. CloudSwitch, a startup based in Burlington, MA, has designed software that could make the transition almost as simple as dragging and dropping a file from one folder to another.

Quantum cryptography only works if Alice and Bob share their relative positions in advance. Now physicists have worked out how to do it without this information.

The world of cryptography is currently undergoing a quantum revolution. The weird laws of quantum mechanics allow cryptographers to create codes that guarantee perfect secrecy. Until recently, the best cryptographers could aim for was just pretty good secrecy with codes that were always compromised in some way or another. Quantum cryptography, on the other hand, is perfect: theoretically and practically secure.

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week:

Florida Power and Light has built a solar power plant linked to a natural gas plant.

A promising approach to reducing the cost of solar power is moving forward with the construction of an installation in Indianatown, FL, that will combine a field of solar concentrators with a natural gas power plant.

The efficiency of the Apollo reflector arrays drops by a factor of ten during a full moon. Now a new analysis may explain why.

Lunar laser ranging experiments have produced a treasure trove of interesting information about the Moon, for example that it is spiralling away from us at a rate of 38 mm per year.

New software aims to expose mobile malware by monitoring a device's memory usage.

Yesterday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, a researcher presented a new way to detect malware on mobile devices. He says it can catch even unknown pests and can protect a device without draining its battery or taking up too much processing power.

The lead-free material may make it easier and cheaper to make "stacked" chips with more computing power.

A new type of solder can be melted and shaped in three dimensions under the force of a weak magnetic field. Using a magnet to pull the solder up through narrow holes makes it possible to create electrical connections between stacked silicon chips, for example. These three-dimensional chips pack more computing power in a given area, but making connections between them is expensive, a problem that the new solder might address. The solder also contains no lead, and it is stronger than other lead-free solders.

Report says Microsoft censors even more harshly than Arab nations do.

At a time when Google is promising to end search censorship in China, a new report has now revealed that Microsoft censors its Bing search engine returns in Arab countries even more heavily than the countries themselves do using national Internet filters. The study covered the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Algeria, and Jordan, and found heavy censorship of anything relating to sex.

If you ever share personal information with friends online you probably already use a special set of rules to determine what to reveal and what to keep secret. Now a new model of social networks attempts to capture that process.

If you ever chat online to friends, colleagues and relatives, you probably have a set of unwritten rules about the kind of information you share with whom. The sort of thing you might take into account is the likelihood that this person will share your information with others, who these other people might be and whether this will be good or bad for you. Above all, you will almost certainly accept that divulging personal details brings you certain benefits, if only that it will strengthen the social bond between you and your correspondent.

The country's space agency says it will launch a module next year to initiate construction.

Specially designed molecules could lead to all-optical data switches that could make the Internet far faster.

New molecules produced at Georgia Tech could enable engineers to build all-optical data routers, ultimately leading to transmission speeds as high as two terabits--or 2,000 gigabits--per second. Today's fastest commercial routers switch data at 40 gigabits per second.

1366 Technologies hopes to cut the cost of solar with cheaper manufacturing.

A new manufacturing process could cut the cost of making crystalline silicon wafers for solar cells by 80 percent. The process is being developed by Lexington, MA-based 1366 Technologies, which this week showed off the first solar cells made this way. The technology is key to the company's plan to make solar power cheaper than the electricity generated from coal within 10 years.