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The CIA and Jeff Bezos bet on quantum computing

October 8, 2012

dwave_ones_in_the_lab_large

With funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the CIA’s investment arm, the Canadian company D-Wave Systems is gaining momentum for its revolutionary approach to computing, Technology Review reports.

D-Wave’s supercooled processor is designed to handle what software engineers call “optimization” problems, the core of conundrums such as figuring out the most efficient delivery route, or how the atoms in a protein will move around when it meets… read more

Topics: Computers/Infotech/UI | Physics/Cosmology | Quantum | Singularity/Futures

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The Civil Heretic

March 26, 2009

Physicist Freeman Dyson dismisses the threat of global warming — an ultimately benign occurrence in what Dyson says is still “a relatively cool period in the earth’s history.”

Rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere are a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields.

If needed, carbon-eating trees could be genetically engineered… read more

Topics: Energy | Environment/Climate | Survival/Defense

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The clear future of electronics

December 10, 2008

Scientists at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have fabricated a working computer chip that is almost completely clear.

The technology, called transparent resistive random access memory (TRRAM),
may enable the development of clear computer monitors, televisions, and other devices embedded inside glass or transparent plastic.

Topics: Electronics

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The closest star system found in a century

March 14, 2013

This image is an artist's conception of the binary system WISE J104915.57-531906 with the Sun in the background (credit: Janella Williams/Penn State)

A pair of stars in the third-closest star system to the Sun has been discovered by an astronomer —  the closest star system discovered since 1916.

The discovery was made by Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a researcher in Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.

The star system,  named “WISE J104915.57-531906″ (discovered in a map by… read more

Topics: Physics/Cosmology | Space

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The cockpit of the future

February 3, 2009

German research scientists have developed a novel car dashboard that functions as a 3-D display and shows velocities, engine speeds, and warnings in three dimensions.

Topics: VR/Augmented Reality/Computer Graphics

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The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

October 13, 2009

The hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the Large Hadron Collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, suggest Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Topics: Physics/Cosmology

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The Coming Chip Revolution

April 8, 2005

Carbon nanotubes are emerging as a leading candidate to replace silicon in future chips.

One IBM prototype device using carbon nanotubes can carry up to 1,000 times the current of copper wires used in today’s silicon chips, making it vastly more efficient.

In addition to being excellent conductors of heat, nanotubes are 10 times stronger than steel and are resistant to radiation. This matters because as chips get… read more

Topics: Electronics

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The Coming Data Explosion

June 2, 2010

As more and more “things” in the world are connected to the Internet, driven by a “sensor revolution” (including data from mobile phones and “ubiquitous nanosensors”), a new computing platform is required to deal with this massive influx of exascale data and the complexity of processing it in real-time.

Topics: Computers/Infotech/UI | Internet/Cloud/Telecom

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The coming revolution in alternative proteins

February 20, 2015

(credit: FutureFood 2050)

Are you ready for cricket-flour energy bars and “steaks” constructed from strips of lab-grown animal muscle fibers?

Some of us may not have a choice. Feeding the rapidly expanding world population will require 470 million tons of annual meat production by 2050, an increase of more than 200 million tons from current annual levels, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).… read more

Topics: Environment/Climate | Survival/Defense

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The Coming Robot Revolution

July 14, 2004

“In the future, robots could help determine the outcome of wars and identify problems in data centers. Office buildings may come to life as they use Wi-Fi to dispatch robots to control human access, test heating and cooling systems, and fetch tools for workers.”

Topics: AI/Robotics

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The coming war on general computation

January 2, 2012

Cory Doctorow's talk

The coming century will be dominated by war against the general-purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race, said Cory Doctorow in “The coming war on general computation” keynote talk at the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin.

“The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only… read more

Topics: Social Networking/Web | Social/Ethical/Legal

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The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey

January 27, 2008

Devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to hit the mass market in cellphone and other non-desktop-computer locations.

Topics: Electronics

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The Coming Wireless Revolution

November 14, 2008

Within the next couple of years, high-bandwidth (tens of megabits per second), far-reaching wireless Internet signals will soon blanket the nation, thanks to a decision by the FCC last week to allow use of megahertz frequency bands that were previously allocated to television broadcasters.

Topics: Electronics | Internet/Cloud/Telecom

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The company that spooked the world

August 6, 2012

Huawei-Headquarters

The “Cyber Security Evaluation Centre” set up in England by Huawei, a Chinese telecom giant, in 2010 marks a new way of persuading purchasers, and the British government, that equipment from the manufacturer that runs it can be trusted, The Economist reports.

It operates in close cooperation with GCHQ, Britain’s signals-intelligence agency. Its security-cleared staff, some of whom used to work for GCHQ, are responsible… read more

Topics: Computers/Infotech/UI | Internet/Cloud/Telecom | Social/Ethical/Legal | Survival/Defense

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The Complete Guide to Googlemania!

February 25, 2004

They named their new search engine Google, for the biggest number they could imagine. But it wasn’t big enough. Today Google’s a library, an almanac, a settler of bets. It’s a parlor game, a dating service, a shopping mall. It’s a Microsoft rival. It’s a verb. At more than 200 million requests a day, it is, by far, the world’s biggest search engine. And now, on the eve of a… read more

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