Category: computing – Page 752
Why are we often so wrong about how the future and future technology will reshape society and our personal lives? In this new video from the Galactic Public Archives, Futurist Gray Scott tells us why he thinks it is important to look at all aspects of the future.
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An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, the most powerful computer on Earth.
This huge leap forward towards creating a universal quantum computer is published today (1 February 2017) in the influential journal Science Advances. It has long been known that such a computer would revolutionise industry, science and commerce on a similar scale as the invention of ordinary computers. But this new work features the actual industrial blueprint to construct such a large-scale machine, more powerful in solving certain problems than any computer ever constructed before.
Once built, the computer’s capabilities mean it would have the potential to answer many questions in science; create new, lifesaving medicines; solve the most mind-boggling scientific problems; unravel the yet unknown mysteries of the furthest reaches of deepest space; and solve some problems that an ordinary computer would take billions of years to compute.
It’s a tricky problem, so solutions have to be carefully thought out.
Federal agencies face a thorny path as they try to step up the government’s fight against armies of infected computers and connected devices known as botnets, responses to a government information request reveal.
Industry, academic and think tank commenters all agreed more should be done to combat the zombie computer armies that digital ne’er-do-wells frequently hire to force adversaries offline.
Synthetic biologists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and associates have developed a living programmable “ribocomputing” device based on networks of precisely designed, self-assembling synthetic RNAs (ribonucleic acid). The RNAs can sense multiple biosignals and make logical decisions to control protein production with high precision.
As reported in Nature, the synthetic biological circuits could be used to produce drugs, fine chemicals, and biofuels or detect disease-causing agents and release therapeutic molecules inside the body. The low-cost diagnostic technologies may even lead to nanomachines capable of hunting down cancer cells or switching off aberrant genes.
IBM and Sony have successfully developed a magnetic tape storage cartridge capable of containing more than 300 terabytes of data. This device, which comes in the smallest format there is, could revolutionize data storage even in cloud platforms.
Magnetic tape drives have been around for more than six decades now. It’s commercial use has been mostly for storing data, such as tax documents and health care records, from mainframe computers. From the first 2-megabyte tape drives in the 1950s, today’s versions are now capable of storing up to 15 terabytes. IBM has been pushing it further.