Fumbling for a cell phone that rang during a meeting can be pretty embarrassing, and tapping out an email on a smartwatch is always a frustrating experience. To make mobile devices even simpler to control, a team of German and American computer scientists has created a patch called the iSkin that turns your epidermis into a digital interface. Just place the patch on your preferred body part, and with a few simple taps, you can answer calls, raise or lower music volume, or type on a bigger smartwatch keyboard without having to grope for the phone in your pocket or bag.
Imagine standing in an open field with a bucket of water balloons and a couple of friends. You've decided to play a game called "Mind." Each of you has your own set of rules. Maybe Molly will throw a water balloon at Bob whenever you throw a water balloon at Molly. Maybe Bob will splash both of you whenever he goes five minutes without getting hit -- or if it gets too warm out or if it's seven o'clock or if he's in a bad mood that day. The details don't matter.
Since the computer age began, microchips have consistently been shrunk to smaller and smaller sizes. Moore’s Law, articulated in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, predicts, fairly accurately to date, that the number of transistors we can fit on a microchip will double every 18 to 24 months, constantly increasing computer speed and efficiency. Many computer scientists and engineers, however, believe we will soon reach a point where the traditional chip circuitry made of silicon will be too microscopic to work reliably.
If a robot read a novel, how would it feel? You might get a sense from these little jingles. Below are some songs that were automatically created by a series of algorithms that turn the emotions in novels into short pieces of music. If the songs remind you, traumatically, of your untalented little sister practicing piano… well, you can't say I didn't warn you.
In an effort to stay one step ahead of the summer monsoon season, Indian scientists are embarking on an ambitious and unprecedented project to build computer models that will allow them to predict the movements of erratic monsoons weeks in advance. If successful, the Indian government thinks it can drastically alter economic outcomes for hundreds of millions of people whose lives depend directly on India's agriculture sector.
In a case that's somewhat chicken-and-egg, one of the many reasons computer scientists and physicists are pursuing a working quantum computer is to model quantum systems themselves. Modeling some quantum properties for systems even with a just a few dozen particles is impossible on even the biggest conventional supercomputers, and the pursuit of new materials and next-level science requires that we find a way to do so. So it's notable that physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have constructed a quantum simulator can simulate interaction between hundreds of quantum bits.
