Extreme Tech- Extreme; IBM's "Brain-Like Chip"

• 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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  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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  Europe’s Rosetta becomes the first spacecraft to orbit a real, live comet (updated) August 6, 2014 at 10:47 am

  Europe’s Rosetta, after a Hollywood-style chase that lasted more than 10 years and spanned a distance of 4 billion miles, has become the first ever spacecraft to orbit a comet. The ESA’s Rosetta probe will now orbit the comet — dubbed 67P or unofficially the rubber duck — for a few months, in preparation for an even more exciting event later in the year: In November, Rosetta will deploy Philae, the first ever spacecraft to attempt a landing on a comet.
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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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  Synology NAS devices targeted by hackers, demand Bitcoin ransom to decrypt files August 5, 2014 at 10:34 am

  Synology is back in the spotlight for NAS trouble — this time its devices are being ransomed for Bitcoin. The company has promised an update as soon as it has details; we’ve got information on how to protect yourself til then.
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  To the core: How can we travel to the center of the Earth? August 4, 2014 at 1:24 pm

  There is an odd dichotomy in human exploration: While we think nothing of going up — jetting through the skies six miles up, skydiving from the edge of space, or launching humans hundreds or thousands of miles into deep space — going down has always proven rather difficult. To this day, the deepest humankind has ever gone is just 7.6 miles below our feet. It’s not that we don’t want to go deeper but, try as we might, despite millennia of developing advanced tools and materials, and exploration that has taken spacecraft to the edge of the Solar System, the subterranean depths remain firmly off-limits. Why?
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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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  2015 Acura TLX review: Tech, refinement puts the new TLX within striking distance of the 3 Series August 4, 2014 at 6:05 am

  New engines, new transmissions for more power and mpg. New tech for safer driving, fewer accidents and clipped jaywalkers

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