In 2018, practically every mundane, household item can possess smart qualities. Your vacuum can move on its own. You can control your coffee maker through an app. There’s even a virtual, personal assistant that can order you pizza, play music, and recite the weather forecast. (Thanks Alexa!) But there are some tasks that are done […]
A team of researchers from IBM, the University of Waterloo, and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) today published the results of an experiment proving a quantum computer can do things a classical one cannot. This may be a watershed moment in the history of computer science. The term for a clear case in which […]
Google’s new Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones launched this week, but there’s only a handful of ways to buy one. While many users likely pre-ordered from Google or Verizon, Best Buy and Target are the other two big-name retailers currently selling the smartphones. Because Verizon has carrier exclusivity, that means that buying a […]
Dna is the oldest information-storage system known. It predates every other, from pencil and paper to computer hard drives, by billions of years. But attempts to employ it to store data generated by people, as opposed to data needed to bring those people (and every other living thing) into being in the first place, have […]
Each of our brain cells could work like a mini-computer, according to the first recording of electrical activity in human cells at a super-fine level of detail. The study has revealed a key structural difference between human and mouse neurons that could help explain our superior powers of intelligence. Brain cells, or neurons, communicate by […]
An Austrian computer repairman has amassed what he believes could be the world’s biggest collection of old Apple computers, but it might all soon be destroyed unless someone can take it off his hands. Over the years since he began working for a company that repaired Apples in Vienna in the 1980s, Roland Borsky’s collection […]
For many years, quantum computers were not much more than an idea. Today, companies, governments and intelligence agencies are investing in the development of quantum technology. Robert König, professor for the theory of complex quantum systems at the TUM, in collaboration with David Gosset from the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo […]
When the European Union’s GDPR privacy protections went into effect in May, the pressure to give Americans the same tools to view their data was high. On Wednesday, Apple fulfilled its promise to offer a data download service for its users the U.S., and now you can find out what Apple’s got on you with […]
Here’s the thing: for all the talk about her email server, Hillary Clinton did not get hacked. “I’ll go on record with that,” says Giri Sreenivas, the founder of Helm. “Podesta was a Gmail user. He got phished.” The subject of email privacy and security has never been more relevant. Not just in the wake […]
Boeing is raising its profile on computational frontiers ranging from artificial intelligence to quantum communications by setting up a new organization called Disruptive Computing and Networks, or DC&N, to put those technologies to work in aerospace. The new organization will be based in Southern California and operate as part of Boeing’s Engineering, Test & Technology […]
For decades, experimenters have used laser light and electromagnetic fields to chill puffs of gas to within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero. At such frigid temperatures, something bizarre can happen: The atoms can crowd into a single macroscopic quantum wave and form a bizarre state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). […]
The latest version of Google’s Chrome browser is now being rolled out for Mac, Windows and Linux, with fixes to the controversial login system that was introduced the previous release. In an attempt to “simplify” the login process, in Chrome 69 Google added a new feature that logged users into the browser when they signed […]
