Category: IT

Getting VR-ready requires a pretty beefy rig, and there’s usually an equally-beefy price tag attached. AMD is looking to lower that barrier with the US$199Radeon RX 480 graphics card. That $199 will net you the 4GB edition of the Radeon RX 480, which AMD says packs the punch of a $500 GPU in terms of VR performance. With this price point the company hopes to drive up adoption rates of VR, encourage developers to create more content for the platform and drive down the costs of VR-ready computers and equipment.…

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Today’s high-speed wired communication networks use lasers to carry information through optical fibers, but wireless networks are currently based on radio frequencies or microwaves. In an advance that could one day make light-based wireless communications ubiquitous, researchers from Facebook Inc.’s Connectivity Lab have demonstrated a conceptually new approach for detecting optical communication signals traveling through the air. The team described the new technology, which could pave the way for fast optical wireless networks capable of delivering internet service to far-flung places, in Optica, The Optical Society’s journal for high impact research.…

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Nanotechnology [1] is enabling technology that deals with nano-meter sized objects. It is expected that nanotechnology will be developed at several levels: materials, devices and systems. The nanomaterials level is the most advanced at present, both in scientific knowledge and in commercial applications. A decade ago, nanoparticles were studied because of their size-dependent physical and chemical properties [2]. Now they have entered a commercial exploration period [3,4]. Living organisms are built of cells that are typically 10 μm across. However, the cell parts are much smaller and are in the…

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The medical-imaging industry is about to get a lot more “real.” New technologies coming to some hospitals and medical schools will allow doctors not only to see three-dimensional pictures produced by imaging equipment such as magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasound, but to interact with what is pictured—say, a heart or liver—as if it were real. Using devices such as virtual-reality viewers, as well as styluses or other hardware that provides a feeling of resistance, doctors will be able to take a tour of a patient’s brain, for example, and even…

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What’s the News: Researchers at IBM have developed a new “cognitive computing” microchip inspired by the brain’s computational tricks. These new chips, the researchers say, could make processors that are more powerful and more efficient than today’s computers—and better at the flexible learning and responses that are a struggle for current AI systems but a breeze for the human brain. How the Heck: IBM has made two prototypes of the new chip, which it calls a “neurosynaptic core.” Both are built on a standard semiconductor platform with 256 “neurons,” the chip’s computational components.RAM units…

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As the number of devices connected to our home, work and school wireless networks continues to grow, and with increasing demands from things like 4K video streaming, the Wi-Fi Alliance is working to make sure the Wi-Fi standard keeps apace with ever higher high-bandwidth demands. The “wave 2” upgrade to 802.11ac brings with it better multitasking, double the channel bandwidth and extended support for 5 GHz connections. One of the most anticipated features wrapped up in the latest upgrade is Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) support, which allows more…

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Most record-breakers eke ahead of previous record-holders by fractions of a second. This was not one of those cases. Before now, the record for storing quantum data at room temperature was two seconds. One. Two. Done. But researchers in Canada announced they’ve now hit 39 minutes. That’s right—they’ve raised the bar from 2 seconds to 39minutes. Today’s quantum computers have to be frozen to function—negative 452.2 degrees Fahrenheit—so the challenge was to store the information when the computer was cold, warm it up to room temperature (77 degrees F—a temperature more…

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For nearly 10 years, computer processors have been getting faster by using multiple cores rather than raising their individual speeds. This measure makes our PCs and smartphones more power-efficient, but also makes it much trickier to write programs that take full advantage of their hardware. Swarm, a new chip design developed at MIT, could now come to the rescue and unleash the full power of parallel processing for up to 75-fold speedups, while requiring programmers to write a fraction of the code. Developed by Prof. Daniel Sanchez and team, Swarm is…

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Against the backdrop of health care reform and a controversial medical device tax, medical technology companies are focusing more than ever on products that deliver cheaper, faster, more efficient patient care. They are also making inroads with U.S. Food & Drug Administration regulators to re-engineer the complex review and approval process for new medical devices. Many in the industry have long felt overly burdened by what they consider to be an unnecessarily complex approval process. Critics claim it impedes innovation and delays the availability of better health care. To change…

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The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today voted 3-2 to uphold the principles of network neutrality – that is, to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to treat all web traffic as equal. This prevents ISPs from being able to throttle or block users’ connections to certain websites, or to offer “Internet fast lanes” whereby large websites could pay for their content to be delivered at a higher speed. Open Internet advocates see this as a huge step to protect the internet’s current status as a free and open platform…

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