The ultimate goal of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to build computing capabilities into every object in the world, but that’s a pipe dream with today’s chips. Now British chip designer Arm thinks it might have the solution after unveiling the most powerful plastic microprocessor to date. The falling cost and size of silicon chips has made it possible to ...
It seems many people leave behind more than just sandcastles when they go home after a trip to the beach. Beach litter is a recurring issue, and it is damaging our coastal environments and wildlife. And there is one small item that is causing a big problem: cigarette butts. They may only be a few […]
Imagine almost limitless clean, carbon-free electricity. That’s the dream that’s driving scientists to build the world’s biggest magnet. The ITER project in southern France is pushing the boundaries of nuclear fusion, a reaction in which atoms are fused releasing enormous amounts of heat. It’s the process that powers the sun, but so far it’s only been ...
Imagine you sit down and pick up your favorite book. You look at the image on the front cover, run your fingers across the smooth book sleeve, and smell that familiar book smell as you flick through the pages. To you, the book is made up of a range of sensory appearances. But you also […]
In August 2013, food critics in London sampled the world’s first lab-grown hamburger. Opinions on taste and texture varied, but most agreed it wasn’t all that different than meat from an animal. At the time, the cultured meat’s taste and texture didn’t seem like too big of a concern, because the cost of making the burger—a […]
For countless millennia, whenever we were faced with a clear, cloudless, moonless night, all of humanity was able to witness the full beauty of a dark, pristine sky. From any location on Earth, thousands of stars could be seen at once, as well as intricate features in the Milky Way, a handful of other galaxies, […]
People are living longer than ever, but there’s growing recognition that longer life expectancy is of little use unless we also delay the physical decline associated with old age. New research suggests doing so could be worth trillions of dollars in economic gains. Over the last century, life expectancy has shot up across the world thanks to improvements in ...
Imagine a collection of books—maybe millions or even billions of them—haphazardly tossed by publishers into a heaping pile in a field. Every day the pile grows exponentially. Those books are brimming with knowledge and answers. But how would a seeker find them? Lacking organization, the books are useless. This is the raw internet in all […]
MIT researchers have made a significant advance on the road toward the full realization of quantum computation, demonstrating a technique that eliminates common errors in the most essential operation of quantum algorithms, the two-qubit operation or “gate.” “Despite tremendous progress toward being able to perform computations with low error rates with ...
