“Eventually, as the kinks are worked out, quantum machines will have a wide impact from scientific research to business. But there’s another area that could benefit from their problem-solving prowess too: Social impact.”
By Eliott Edge
“It is possible for a computer to become conscious. Basically, we are that. We are data, computation, memory. So we are conscious computers in a sense.”
—Tom Campbell, NASA
If the universe is a computer simulation, virtual reality, or video game, then a few unusual conditions seem to necessarily fall out from that reading. One is what we call consciousness, the mind, is actually something like an artificial intelligence. If the universe is a computer simulation, we are all likely one form of AI or another. In fact, we might come from the same computer that is creating this simulated universe to begin with. If so then it stands to reason that we are virtual characters and virtual minds in a virtual universe.
“My phone habits are, I’d like to think, better than most. I seldom take my phone out in company and it’s a rare site to see me scrolling through social media. But when I’m walking to or from work, standing in an elevator, or eating by myself, I’ll often be checking emails, texting friends, or reading articles.”
A tiny (one-centimeter-square) biosensor chip developed at EPFL is designed to be implanted under your skin to continuously monitor concentrations of pH, temperature, and metabolism-related molecules like glucose, lactate and cholesterol, as well as some drugs.
The chip would replace blood work, which may take hours — or even days — for analysis and is a limited snapshot of conditions at the moment the blood is drawn.
Using a new technique they call “in-air microfluidics,” University of Twente scientists succeed in printing 3D structures with living cells. This special technique enable the fast and ‘on-the-fly’ production of micro building blocks that are viable and can be used for repairing damaged tissue, for example. The work is presented in Science Advances.
Microfluidics is all about manipulating tiny drops of fluid with sizes between a micrometer and a millimeter. Most often, chips with tiny fluidic channels, reactors and other components are used for this: lab-on-a-chip systems. Although these chips offer a broad range of possibilities, in producing emulsions for example—droplets carrying another substance – the speed at which droplets leave the chip is typically in the microliter per minute range. For clinical and industrial applications, this is not fast enough: filling a volume of a cubic centimeter would take about 1000 minutes or 17 hours. The technique that is presented now, does this in a couple of minutes.
Right now, you’re carrying around the most powerful computer in existence – the human brain. This naturally super-efficient machine is far better than anything humans have ever built, so it’s not surprising that scientists are trying to reverse-engineer it. Rather than binary bits of information, neuromorphic computers are built with networks of artificial neurons, and now an MIT team has developed a more lifelike synapse to better connect those neurons.
For simplicity’s sake, computers process and store information in a binary manner – everything can be broken down into a series of ones and zeroes. This system has served us well for the better part of a century, but having access to a whole new world of analog “grey areas” in between could really give computing power a shot in the arm.
You can start getting pumped about the next generation of graphics cards, as Samsung has announced that it’s building the first-ever 16-gigabit GDDR6 chips using its 10-nanometer class technology. The news isn’t a complete surprise, as Samsung previously said that GDDR6 was coming when it unveiled 8-gigabit DDR4 RAM chips last month and won a CES 2018 Innovation Award in November.
“Beginning with this early production of the industry’s first 16Gb GDDR6, we will offer a comprehensive graphics DRAM line-up, with the highest performance and densities, in a very timely manner,” said Samsung’s Senior VP Jinman Han. The company also did a minor tease, saying the chips “will play a critical role in early launches of next-generation graphics cards and systems.”
The voracious demand from bitcoin mining has pushed the GeForce GTX 1070 from a $380 suggested retail price to $890.
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