On Monday, a team of scientists in Australia announced an exciting breakthrough: For the first time, researchers were able to turn light into sound on a microchip. But—as crazy-sounding new physics applications tend to be—it’s probably going to be a long time before you see one of these chips on a computer you can…
There are weeks where it seems like every piece of physics news mentions quantum computing—but we are nowhere near a quantum iPhone. You probably remember that computers can consist of billions of nanometer-scale transistors etched into silicon. Those chips used to be enormous, room-sized setups where instead of…
You’ve probably seen mention of the Raspberry Pi in your travels across the internet, but what exactly is this compact piece of circuitry? What can you do with it and why would you want to? If you’re new to the life of Pi then we’re here to explain everything you need to know and then some.
The Windows registry is a sprawling, usually impenetrable settings file covering just about every aspect of the operating system and applications running on a computer. A lot of these settings are hidden from the user, but if you know what you’re doing, you can don your tweaking and customize Windows in a variety of…
Sometimes you can find a real gem on eBay. The UK’s National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park certainly did: It spotted a Nazi teleprinter used during the war for sale on the site and bought it for just $15.
Cheap, easy-to-control Arduino boards are the bread and butter of garage inventors the world over. Regular Arduinos are already pretty small, but the AAduino design shrinks things down to the size of—you guessed it—an AA battery.
Yes, this vocodery song about Ada Lovelace, the pioneering computer programmer, will totally get stuck in your head. But it’s totally worth it, because everyone should think about Ada Lovelace more.
When Google’s AI beat a world champion at Go, scientists and technologists around the globe held it up as a watershed moment for AI. But why, exactly, is it so hard for a computer to play some games well?
As optical computing becomes a more realistic prospect, lasers will be required to connect components inside our devices. Now, a new silicon-based laser could make it far easier for researchers to replace wires with beams of light.
In 1976, Martin E. Hellman and Whitfield Diffie created public-key cryptography—and with it transformed the world of digital security. Now, they’ve been honored with the 2016 Turing Award, often considered to be the computing equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
A new kind of semiconductor is the first material with a 2D geometry to provide the electrical properties of silicon—but its shape could mean that it’s actually able to outperform the reliable old material.
The NSA is worried about quantum computers. It warns that it “must act now” to ensure that encryption systems can’t be broken wide open by the new super-fast hardware.
Transistors are everywhere—in your computer, car, phone, and refrigerator—but they’re not shrinking fast enough to satisfy our hunger for ever-faster devices. A new kind of light-based transistor might just fix that.
The <pointy brackets> are an archetypal pair of characters in the world of computing. But if you’ve ever wondered how they became so pervasive, you’re in luck.
A team of researchers from MIT has developed an artificial intelligence system that can fool human judges into thinking it’s a person when it comes to drawing unfamiliar letter-like characters.
A team of researchers from Google’s artificial intelligence labs has published results which it claims demonstrate that its controversial D-Wave quantum computer really works.
It may seem like some kind of delicate flower head, but you’re actually looking at the results of a computational model which is used to predict what happens inside a star when it spins quickly on its axis.
This may look like a regular RAM chip, but oh my it packs a punch. This is the latest chunk of RAM to roll off Samsung’s production line—and it squeezes a giddying 128GB into its svelte little frame.
Raspberry Pi has been making small, affordable computers for a while now, but it’s just gone and made things insanely cheap. Its latest miniature computer, the Pi Zero, will cost just $5.
When it comes to supercomputers, the U.S. used to rule the roost. But these days its status is slipping—while China is surging ahead.
