Science

Google this week announced a hardware initiative to design and build new quantum information processors based on superconducting electronics. The effort is related to the launch last year of its Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab. Physicist John Martinis, winner of the 2014 Fritz London Memorial Pr...

Pharmaceutical giant AbbVie on Wednesday announced it was teaming up with Google-funded Calico, the life sciences initiative aimed at helping patients deal with diseases and other negative effects associated with aging. Under the terms of the partnership, both AbbVie and Calico will invest up to $25...

The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration next month will reformat the flash memory of the Mars exploration rover Opportunity. Opportunity's been undergoing computer resets with increasing frequency -- it had 12 in August alone. Recovery from each of the resets takes one to two...

A very interesting book just hit the market. Written by Martine Rothblatt -- apparently she is America's top paid female CEO -- its title is Virtually Human: The Promise -- and the Peril -- of Digital Immortality. The subject is digital clones, and Rothblatt goes into depth about what they are, when...

A current trend among smartphone makers is to thrust a sapphire screen onto the face. Among the 17 million rumors regarding the next iPhone is that it will feature such a display -- the camera and Touch ID components already feature sapphire. Until Apple reveals the truth about its next smartphone, ...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Hacker Attacks on Healthcare Providers Jump 600 Percent

The recent data breach at Community Health Systems, in which Chinese hackers stole the personal information of 4.3 million patients, was another sign of a disturbing trend that security researchers at Websense have been observing for months: Healthcare providers are coming under cyberattack at an al...

A team of university researchers have been busy building Robo Brain, a large-scale computational system that collates information from the Internet, as well as data from computer simulations and real-life robot trials, and learns from it. That knowledge base will be used to drive prototypes for robo...

Researchers recently developed a technique to record the quantum mechanical behavior of one electron in a nanoscale defect in diamond. The team used ultra-fast pulses of laser light both to control the defect's entire quantum state and to observe how the state of one electron in the defect changes o...

Intel on Friday announced it is working with rapper Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson's SMS Audio to develop earbuds that will monitor users' heart rates. The SMS Audio BioSport In-Ear Headphones will have an earhook and will be powered by the user's smartphone. They will be sweat- and water-resistant. The e...

Apple has begun ramping up for an incursion into the healthcare market, two months after announcing its HealthKit app at WWDC. The app will collate all a user's fitness and health data. Apple reportedly has discussed HealthKit with healthcare providers Mount Sinai, the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hop...

Atmospheric pollution may not be among mankind's proudest achievements, but it's an incontrovertible sign that we are here. Could something similar help us find civilizations on other planets? That's the premise behind one of several recently announced new approaches to the search for extraterrestri...

I Think, Therefore IBM

IBM has announced the latest version of its neurosynaptic processor -- that is, a processor whose workings are inspired by the human brain. Built on Samsung's 28nm process technology, it has 5.4 billion transistors and an on-chip network of 4,096 neurosynaptic cores. IBM claims it is the first neuro...

Researchers have developed an algorithm to extract audio information from video footage. They recovered intelligible speech from a video of a potato chip bag that was shot at a distance of 15 feet behind soundproof glass. The team also obtained useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the ...

LittleBits, the maker of what might best be thought of as electronic Lego kits, last week launched cloudBit, a module that provides users with access to the Internet. LittleBits offers modules that are used, like Legos, to build gizmos with electronic capabilities. The modules are held together by m...

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