More than a game

Astrophysicists find a new use for the video cards that give computer games that movie quality: crunching scientific data. Spurred less by "Eureka!" than by "There's got to be an easier way," a group of young physicists at SLAC and Stanford have demonstrated a way to crunch certain data-heavy astrophysics calculations more than a hundred times faster than the usual methods--turning what could have been days spent waiting for the results into a few hours' worth of computer time. Their secret? Han...