As Moore's Law slows, people are starting to look for alternatives to the silicon chips we've long been reliant on. A new optical switch up to 1,000 times faster than normal one day form the basis of new computers that use light rather than electricity. transistors could The attraction of optical computing is obvious.

Sometimes, it's easy for a computer to predict the future. Simple phenomena, such as how sap flows down a tree trunk, are straightforward and can be captured in a few lines of code using what mathematicians call linear differential equations.