Category: IT

AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel are the latest companies to band together with the aim of standardizing interoperability across smart machines and ultimately, drive adoption of an Internet of Things. Announced last week, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) is a not-for-profit open membership group created to establish common frameworks for development of inter-connected digital and physical worlds. While the notion of device-to-device communication holds great potential across a range of industries, with different manufacturers using different engineering standards, development has been slow-moving in the eyes of some. In December last…

Some residents of Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a holiday gift this December – the fastest home internet speed available just about anywhere in the world. US Internet, based in the Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka, announced this week that it has begun rolling out 10 gigabit per second internet access, ten times faster than Google Fiber‘s much-publicized gigabit connections, and similarplanned networks in the UK. It’s also much faster than typical speeds in South Korea, often cited as having the fastest average connections in the world. The company says that compared to the…

Technology is improving at a rapid pace, as many things are possible today that were not possible 10 years ago even if we tried our best to make it happen. Today, some of the impossible things are rising to the occasion in the form of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. But what are they exactly? Let’s find out. Back in the 1990s, virtual reality was on the lips of everyone as multiple companies tried and failed to make it happen. The most notable device back then was the Nintendo Virtual…

Computers built on the principles of quantum physics—as opposed to ‘classical’ physics—promise a revolution on the order of the invention of the microprocessor or the splitting of the atom. D-Wave, a small Canadian company backed by Jeff Bezos, NASA, and the CIA among others, is the first firm to sell a so-called quantum computer—at roughly $10 million a pop. The vast increase in power could revolutionize fields as disparate as medicine, space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Inthis week’s TIME cover story, Lev Grossman writes that D-Wave’s machines are “so radical…

By Alice Klein I feel like I’ve landed on an alien planet. I’m walking across the surface of a breast cancer cell as drug nanoparticles whizz past my head like spaceships. One of the particles suddenly crashes in front of me, and I teeter on the edge of an abyss as it is sucked through the surface. It feels real – and in a sense, it is. The cell I am exploring in virtual reality is not a conceptual model. John McGhee of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and…

As powerful as today’s traditional supercomputers are, they still struggle greatly with modeling chemical systems. For example, chemists still don’t fully understand exactly how bacteria produce fertilizer at room temperature. Considering the fact that fertilizer production is inefficient and consumes as much as two percent of the world’s energy each year, solving its mysteries could save billions of dollars. Now, researchers from Harvard, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, UC Santa Barbara, Tufts University and University College London are one step closer to being able to solve that and other difficult models…