WASHINGTON: Scientists are a step closer to restoring vision for the blind, after building an implant that bypasses the eyes and allows monkeys to perceive artificially induced patterns in their brains.
The technology, developed by a team at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN), was described in the journal Science on Thursday.
It builds on an idea first conceived decades ago: electrically stimulating the brain so it “sees” lit dots known as phosphenes, akin to pixels on a computer screen.
FireEye, normally the first company that cyberattack victims will call, has now admitted it too has fallen victim to hackers, which the company called a “sophisticated threat actor” that was likely backed by a nation-state.
In a blog post confirming the breach, the company’s chief executive Kevin Mandia said the nation-backed hackers have “top-tier offensive capabilities,” but did not attribute blame or say which government was behind the attack.
Mandia, who founded Mandiant, the incident response firm acquired by FireEye in 2014, said the hackers used a “novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past” to steal hacking tools used typically by red teams, which are tasked with launching authorized but offensive hacking campaigns against customers in order to find weaknesses or vulnerabilities before malicious hackers do.
In what could be one of the significant developments in the field of quantum computing, Chinese researchers suggest having achieved quantum supremacy with the capability of performing calculations 100 trillion times faster than the world’s most advanced supercomputer. Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, believe that when put into practical use, it can carry calculations in minutes which would have otherwise taken two billion years to perform. The fastest supercomputers, before this, claimed to have achieved computational efficiency easing up to 10,000 years of calculations.
Jiuzhang, as the supercomputer is called, has outperformed Google’s supercomputer, which the company had claimed last year to have achieved quantum computing supremacy. The supercomputer by Google named Sycamore is a 54-qubit processor, consisting of high-fidelity quantum logic gates that could perform the target computation in 200 seconds.
The researchers explored Boson sampling, a task considered to be a strong candidate to demonstrate quantum computational advantage. As the researcher cited in the research paper, they performed Gaussian boson sampling (GBS), which is a new paradigm of boson sampling, one of the first feasible protocols for quantum computational advantage. In boson sampling and its variants, nonclassical light is injected into a linear optical network, which generates highly random photon-number, measured by single-photon detectors.
It’s been four years, and we still don’t really know what Google intends to do with this OS.
It’s been over four years since we first found out that Google is developing a new operating system called Fuchsia. It’s unique because it’s not based on a Linux kernel; instead, it uses a microkernel called Zircon. It’s also unique because, despite being developed “in the open” on publicly browsable repositories, nobody really understands what the OS is for, and Google executives have been remarkably coy about it all.
Today, that mix of trends continues as the company announces that it’s opening up a little more by asking for more public contributors from outside its organization. Google says it has “created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on.”
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a dive into the code and documentation Google has made available, though there are some early UI examples. Google’s post today emphasizes that “Fuchsia is not ready for general product development or as a development target,” but it’s likely that the announcement will spur another round of analysis.
