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  By 2020, you could have an exascale speed-of-light optical computer on your desk August 8, 2014 at 1:29 pm

  Optalysys, a UK technology company, says it’s on-target to demonstrate a novel optical computer, which performs calculations at the speed of light, in January 2015. If all goes to plan, Optalysys says its tech — which is really unlike anything you’ve ever heard of before — can put an exascale supercomputer on your desk by 2020.
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  Harvard & MIT create first self-assembling robots – the first real Transformers August 8, 2014 at 11:00 am

  Harvard and MIT engineers, showing reckless disregard for the robocalypse, have created origami robots that can self-assemble themselves — from a flat piece of paper and polystyrene — and walk away in just four minutes. “Getting a robot to assemble itself autonomously and actually perform a function has been a milestone we’ve been chasing for many years,” says Harvard’s Robert Wood, barely stifling a maniacal cackle.
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  IBM cracks open a new era of computing with brain-like chip: 4096 cores, 1 million neurons, 5.4 billion transistors August 7, 2014 at 2:00 pm

  Scientists at IBM Research have created by far the most advanced neuromorphic (brain-like) computer chip to date. The chip, called TrueNorth, consists of 1 million programmable neurons 256 million programmable synapses spread out across 4096 individual neurosynaptic cores. Built on Samsung’s 28nm process and with a monstrous transistor count of 5.4 billion, this is one of the largest and most advanced computer chips ever made. Perhaps most importantly, though, TrueNorth is incredibly efficient: The chip consumes just 72 milliwatts at max load, which equates to around 400 billion synaptic operations per second per watt — or about 176,000 times more efficient than a modern CPU running the same workload, or 769 times more efficient than other state-of-the-art neuromorphic approaches. Yes, IBM is now a big step closer to building a brain on a chip.
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  MIT can now eavesdrop through soundproof glass by watching the vibrations of a bag of chips August 7, 2014 at 8:01 am

  With a breakthrough that sounds more like the plot from the latest instalment of James bond than an academic research paper, engineers at MIT have managed to recover speech by analyzing the tiny vibrations of a potato chip bag from 15 feet away — with a video camera watching through soundproof glass. There are some obvious security and forensics repercussions from this work, but other interesting uses will surely emerge (such as recovering audio from silent film, perhaps?)
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  Chinese government bans use of Apple products in deepening US conflict August 6, 2014 at 1:41 pm

  A recent ban on Apple products in government procurements is the latest Chinese trade decision designed to put pressure on both the US government and US companies.
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  US military developing Star Trek-like 3D food printer to improve awful MRE rations August 6, 2014 at 11:45 am

  3D printing might be the key to making US Army field rations (known as MREs) less terrible.
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  Western Digital’s HGST division creates new phase-change SSD that’s orders of magnitude faster than any NAND flash drive on the market August 6, 2014 at 9:02 am

  HGST is demonstrating a new type of phase change memory array that’s orders of magnitude faster than NAND — so fast, they had to redesign PCI-Express to make the protocol work.
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  Full duplex: A fundamental radio tech breakthrough that could double throughput, alleviate the spectrum crunch August 5, 2014 at 1:45 pm

  The common wisdom goes that we’re reaching the limits of what is possible with RF, given the technological constraints that are generally accepted in RF-based technology. But what if one of those constraints was blown away?
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  Could Microsoft upgrade the Xbox One’s hardware to fix the PS4 performance gap? August 5, 2014 at 12:05 pm

  As you are well aware, there is a sizable gap between the hardware specifications of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But who says this will always be the case? It’s not unusual for a console to be tweaked or upgraded multiple times throughout its lifetime as new (cheaper) hardware becomes available. Because both consoles use fairly standard PC hardware, could Sony or Microsoft upgrade their consoles to close (or widen) the current performance gap?
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  Elon Musk warns us that human-level AI is ‘potentially more dangerous than nukes’ August 4, 2014 at 8:39 am

  Elon Musk, the mastermind behind SpaceX and Tesla, believes that artificial intelligence is “potentially more dangerous than nukes,” imploring all of humankind “to be super careful with AI,” unless we want the ultimate fate of humanity to closely resemble Judgment Day from Terminator. Personally I think Musk is being a little hyperbolic — after all, we’ve survived more than 60 years of the threat of thermonuclear mutually assured destruction — but still, it’s worth considering Musk’s words in greater detail.

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