Toggle light / dark theme

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.

Google has increased the maximum prize for its Android bug bounty program to $1 million for anyone who can compromise the Titan M security chip found in its Pixel phones. The top prize is for a “full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence” of the dedicated security chip. On top of that, there’s an additional 50 percent bonus if a security researcher is able to find an exploit on specific developer preview versions of Android, resulting in a potential prize of $1.5 million. The new rewards take effect starting today.

Introduced with 2018’s Pixel 3, Google’s Titan M security chip cordons off your smartphone’s most sensitive data from its main processor to protect against certain attacks. Google says the chip offers “on-device protection for login credentials, disk encryption, app data, and the integrity of the operating system.” Since its introduction, the chip has also been integrated with Android’s security key functionality where it’s used to store a person’s FIDO credentials. Suffice it to say, the integrity of the Titan M is an important element for the security of recent Pixel devices.

Researchers at Northeastern have discovered a new antibiotic that could treat infections caused by some of the nastiest superbugs humanity is facing in the antibiotic resistance crisis.

Astronomers believe that new measurements from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the Universe is expanding about 9% faster than expected based on its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang.

This means that the Hubble constant (H0) — the measure of the current expansion rate of the Universe, named after Edwin Hubble, the man who first observed said expansion — needs adjustment from its current figure of ~2 × 10-¹⁸ s-¹.

Adam Riess, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, Nobel Laureate, says of the disparity between old calculations and these new findings: “This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. This is not what we expected.”