Computing

Think of the Things You Could Do With This AA-Sized Arduino Board

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. DIYer Johan Kanflo was looking for a way to shrink down the (already small) Tiny328 board he was using,…

Tech News Chris Mills

This 30-Second Tribute to Ada Lovelace Is an Earworm for Great Justice

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. We wrote here and here about how Ada Lovelace developed the first computer program, but in a nutshell, she became fascinated with Charles Babbage’s…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

Why It’s So Hard for AI to Play Some Games

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? Without wanting to sound like a scene from the cutting room floor of Karate Kid, the…

Artificial Intelligence Jamie Condliffe

The World’s First Silicon-Based Laser Will Light Up Computing

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. Researchers have been trying to build a working laser using silicon for years now. That’s because so many…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe

Creators of Public Key Encryption Honored With This Year’s Turing Award

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. The announcement was made at the RSA Conference, an international gathering of computing experts currently taking…

Privacy & Security Jamie Condliffe

A Brand New 2D Semiconductor Could Put Silicon in the Shade

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. Like graphene, the new semiconductor is a 2D layer that’s just a single atom thick. Made up of tin and oxygen—or…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

NSA Plans to ‘Act Now’ to Ensure Quantum Computers Can’t Break Encryption

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. In a document outlining common concerns about the effects that quantum computing may have on national security and encryption of sensitive data, the NSA warns that…

Privacy & Security Jamie Condliffe

A New Light-Based Transistor Could Completely Change the Way Chips Work

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. At its most straightforward, a transistor—or field effect transistor, to give the microscopic device found in all your electronics its proper name—is just a…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe

How Pointy Brackets Became a Computing Icon

The 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. In this video, Professor David Brailsford explains that the pointy bracket first arrived on the scene to make Noam Chomsky’s hierarchy—now a fundamental tenet of computer science—a little easier to…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe

A New AI System Passed a Visual Turing Test

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. You can think of the experiment, detailed in the new issue of Science, as a kind of visual Turing Test. The software and a human…

Artificial Intelligence Jamie Condliffe

Google Claims to Have Proved That Its Quantum Computer Actually Works

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. Google bought one of D-Wave’s quantum computers back in 2013. Claimed to be the “world’s first commercial quantum computer,” the device sits at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California,…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

Peer Inside a Beautiful Model of a Spinning Star

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. Developed by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, this models depicts a star that’s about…

Space & Spaceflight Jamie Condliffe

This Is Samsung’s Crazy New 128GB RAM Chip

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. The chip, designed for big enterprise servers, uses Samsung’s “through silicon via” manufacturing technique. That allows the…

Gadgets Jamie Condliffe

There’s a New Raspberry Pi That Only Costs $5

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. The miniature board—it measures just 65mm x 30mm x 5mm—is intended to make it even easier to provide people all around the world…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe

China Is Starting to Spank the U.S. With Supercomputing Resources

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. How bad is the problem? This bad, according to the new Top500 list, which rounds up supercomputer performance around the world every six months: China nearly tripled the number of systems on…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe

How Computers Broke Science—and What We Can Do to Fix It

Virtually every researcher relies on computers to collect or analyze data. But when computers are opaque black boxes that manipulate data, it’s impossible to replicate studies – a core value for science. Reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of science. Made popular by British scientist Robert Boyle in the 1660s, the idea is that a…

Tech News Ben Marwick

State Department Decides Not to Classify ‘Cyber Products’ as ‘Munitions’

This week, the U.S. Department of State’s Defense Trade Advisory Group (DTAG) met to decide whether to classify “cyber products” as munitions, placing them in the same export control regime as hand grenades and fighter planes. Thankfully, common sense won out and the DTAG recommended that “cyber products” not be added to the control list.…

Tech News Nate Cardozo & Eva Galperin

Bosch Has a Pedestrian Avoidance System It Wants to Put in Real Cars By 2018

Bosch has announced that it’s been working on a system that can detect and help avoid pedestrians that step out in front of cars, and it hopes to fit it to production vehicles as soon as 2018. The Engineer reportsthat the system, developed at Bosch’s R&D centre at Renningen in Germany, isn’t fully autonomous, but…

Artificial Intelligence Jamie Condliffe

A Tiny Silicon Disc Is the World’s Fastest Nanoscale Optical Switch

With the future of computing looking increasingly likely to become light-based, it pays to work out how to make the switching of light as efficient as possible. Enter tiny silicon discs, which have now been shown to be the fastest ever optical switches at the nanoscale. Created by a team of researchers from Lomonosov Moscow…

Physics & Chemistry Jamie Condliffe

This New Arduino 101 Uses Intel’s Tiny, Low-Power Curie Chip

This is the latest addition to Arduino’s line-up of budget-friendly development boards, and it uses Intel’s cute-as-a-button Curie chip to power itself along. In fact, the Intel chip’s not far off the size of a button, either, yet somehow it manages to squeeze Bluetooth and a six-axis sensor with gyroscope and accelerometer into its frame,…

Tech News Jamie Condliffe

Think of the Things You Could Do With This AA-Sized Arduino Board

This 30-Second Tribute to Ada Lovelace Is an Earworm for Great Justice

Why It’s So Hard for AI to Play Some Games

The World’s First Silicon-Based Laser Will Light Up Computing

Creators of Public Key Encryption Honored With This Year’s Turing Award

A Brand New 2D Semiconductor Could Put Silicon in the Shade

NSA Plans to ‘Act Now’ to Ensure Quantum Computers Can’t Break Encryption

A New Light-Based Transistor Could Completely Change the Way Chips Work

How Pointy Brackets Became a Computing Icon

A New AI System Passed a Visual Turing Test

Google Claims to Have Proved That Its Quantum Computer Actually Works

Peer Inside a Beautiful Model of a Spinning Star

This Is Samsung’s Crazy New 128GB RAM Chip

There’s a New Raspberry Pi That Only Costs $5

China Is Starting to Spank the U.S. With Supercomputing Resources

How Computers Broke Science—and What We Can Do to Fix It

State Department Decides Not to Classify ‘Cyber Products’ as ‘Munitions’

Bosch Has a Pedestrian Avoidance System It Wants to Put in Real Cars By 2018

A Tiny Silicon Disc Is the World’s Fastest Nanoscale Optical Switch

This New Arduino 101 Uses Intel’s Tiny, Low-Power Curie Chip

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