A livestreamed event at 8 p.m. PT will offer a look at the startup’s progress developing a “brain-machine interface.”
Category: computing – Page 618
The answer, Markham says, may lie in a new breed of computing chips called neuromorphic processors that are designed to operate more like the human brain. Such chips may be able to function on just 1/100 or 1/1,000 of the electricity needed by today’s processors and be less reliant on sending data to cloud servers for analysis. Everyone from tech giants like Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm to startups like aiCTX and Brainchip are racing to develop this new kind of chip.
First major corporate partners come on board effort to create neuromorphic chips based on design of the human brain.
The notion of wearing lenses over our eyes to correct our vision dates back hundreds of years, with some even crediting Leonardo da Vinci as one of the first proponents of the idea (though that remains somewhat controversial). Material science and our understanding of the human eye have come a long way since, while their purpose has remained largely the same. In the age of wearable computers, however, scientists in the laboratories of DARPA, Google, and universities around the world see contact lenses not just as tools to improve our vision, but as opportunities to augment the human experience. But how? And why?
As a soft, transparent disc of plastic and silicone that you wear on your eyeball, a contact lens may seem like a very bad place to put electronics. But if you look beneath the surface, the idea of a smart contact lens has real merit, and that begins with its potential to improve our well-being.
US Defence Secretary Mark Esper on Friday ruled out allegations of unfair competition in the awarding of a US$10-billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft.
“I am confident it was conducted freely and fairly, without any type of outside influence,” Esper told a news conference in Seoul, South Korea.
Formally called the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure, or JEDI, the contract was awarded to Microsoft on 25 October, and the lucrative deal could span 10 years.
Barbara Liskov pioneered the modern approach to writing code. She warns that the challenges facing computer science today can’t be overcome with good design alone.
The fast-moving development of brain-machine interfaces got a boost when Elon Musk announced the work for Neuralink, his new company devoted to implantable devices to enhance cognition and better marry our brains with super-computing. His competitor, fellow tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson of Kernel, weighs in on why he thinks advancing cognition can solve all the other problems in the world. But tech ethicist Tristan Harris says not so fast — we haven’t properly accounted for what existing tech has already done to us. Think things through with this brainy episode of Future You with Elise Hu.
—————————————————–
Follow NPR elsewhere, too:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/npr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NPR
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/npr/
• Tumblr: http://npr.tumblr.com/
• Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com/add/npr
ABOUT NPR
Scientists used a computer program to uncover more than 1 million molecules that could potentially store genetic information, just like DNA.
A pair of mathematicians from Australia and France have devised an alternative way to multiply numbers together, while solving an algorithmic puzzle that has perplexed some of the greatest math minds for almost half a century.
For most of us, the way we multiply relatively small numbers is by remembering our times tables – an incredibly handy aid first pioneered by the Babylonians some 4,000 years ago.
But what if the numbers get bigger? Well, if the figures get unwieldy – and assuming we don’t have a calculator or computer, of course – most of us would then turn to long multiplication: another useful trick we learn in school, and a trusty technique for multiplying basically any two numbers together.
Polymorphism is a remarkable concept in chemistry, materials science, computer science, and biology. Whether it is the ability of a material to exist in two or more crystal structures, a single interface connecting to two different entities, or alternative phenotypes of an organism, polymorphism determines function and properties. In materials science, polymorphism can be found in an impressively wide range of materials, including crystalline materials, minerals, metals, alloys, and polymers. Here we report on polymorphism in a liquid crystal. A bent-core liquid crystal with a single chiral side chain forms two structurally and morphologically significantly different liquid crystal phases solely depending on the cooling rate from the isotropic liquid state. On slow cooling, the thermodynamically more stable oblique columnar phase forms, and on rapid cooling, a not heretofore reported helical microfilament phase. Since structure determines function and properties, the structural color for these phases also differs.