Einstein got a lot right. He also got a few things wrong, such as his distrust of Quantum Mechanics and his basic rule that nothing can travel faster-than-light. John Singleton of Los Alamos didn’t let Einstein get in the way of developing a gizmo that can force radio waves to travel faster than the speed of light, possibly ushering in a new era of communications.

From UniverseToday:

One possible use for faster than light radio waves — which are packed into a very powerful wave the size of a pencil point — could be the creation of a new generation of cell phones that communicate directly to satellites, rather than transmitting through relay towers as they now do.

Those phones would have more reliable service and would also be more difficult for hackers to intercept, Singleton said.

Speedy radio waves could also revolutionize the computing industry. Data could be transferred more quickly, and if used in semiconductors, it would mean faster caches and the ability to communicate across separate pieces of silicon nearly instantly.

In the health field, faster than light radio waves could be in extremely targeted chemotherapy, where a patient takes the drugs, and the radio waves are used to activate them very specifically in the area around a tumor, Singleton said.

You can read the hardcore science abstract here.

The latest Star Trek movie has placed the concept of Time Travel back in the public consciousness, which is a great time to issue basic rules for all screenwriters to obey for their future creative efforts. Time travel may seem impossible, but as we learn more about quantum mechanics, it may not be as impossible as it seems. In fact, time travel is quite common at a small scale, like when you travel on an airplane and add nanoseconds to your life relative to everyone else stuck on the ground.

From Discover:

5. Black Holes Are Not Time Machines

Sadly, if you fell into a black hole, it would not spit you out at some other time. It wouldn’t spit you out at all — it would gobble you up and grow slightly more corpulent in the process. If the black hole were big enough, you might not even notice when you crossed the point of no return defined by the event horizon. But once you got close to the center of the hole, tidal forces would tug at you — gently at first, but eventually tearing you apart. The technical term is spaghettification. Not a recommended strategy for would-be time adventurers.

Wormholes — tunnels through spacetime, which in principle can connect widely-separated events — are a more promising alternative. Wormholes are to black holes as elevators are to deep wells filled with snakes and poisoned spikes. The problem is, unlike black holes, we don’t know whether wormholes exist, or even whether they can exist, or how to make them, or how to preserve them once they are made. Wormholes want to collapse and disappear, and keeping them open requires a form of negative energies. Nobody knows how to make negative energies, although they occasionally slap the name “exotic matter” on the concept and pretend it might exist.