Technology Innovation Today

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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