Many people who use computers and other digital devices are aware that all the words and images displayed on their monitors boil down to a sequence of ones and zeros. But few likely appreciate what is behind those ones and zeros: microscopic arrays of “magnetic moments” (imagine tiny bar magnets with positive and negative poles).…

Some scientists dream about big data. The dream bridges two divided realms. One realm holds lofty peaks of number-crunching scientific computation. Endless waves of big data analysis line the other realm. A deep chasm separates the two. Discoveries await those who cross these estranged lands. Unfortunately, data cannot move seamlessly between Hadoop (HDFS) and parallel…

Dell Technologies, the world’s largest privately-controlled technology company, brings out of stealth its venture practice, Dell Technologies Capital. Since its inception a few years ago, Dell Technologies Capital has been an active investor in more than 70 early-stage startups, with the mission of  helping founders and their teams develop innovative technology solutions and bring them to…

Under a collaborative partnership between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Energy, a new automated measurement system developed at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will ensure quality production of plutonium-238 while reducing handling by workers. NASA has funded ORNL and other national laboratories to develop a process that will restore U.S.…

Research published Wednesday in Nature Scientific Reports lays out a theoretical map to use ferroelectric material to process information using multivalued logic – a leap beyond the simple ones and zeroes that make up our current computing systems that could let us process information much more efficiently. The language of computers is written in just two symbols…

A new proof-of-concept study by researchers from the University of California San Diego succeeded in training computers to “learn” what a healthy versus an unhealthy gut microbiome looks like based on its genetic makeup. Since this can be done by genetically sequencing fecal samples, the research suggests there is great promise for new diagnostic tools…

Imagine a dim light which is insufficiently bright enough to illuminate a room. An amplifier for such a light would increase the brightness by increasing the number of photons emitted. Photonics researchers have created such a high gain optical amplifier that is compact enough to be placed on a chip. The developed amplifier, when used…

Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies and techniques have improved the productivity and accuracy of DNA sequencers. The benefits of Moore’s Law are reducing the cost of the High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities needed to perform the alignment and other workflow steps on the outputs from NGS sequencing machines. These two trends deliver tremendous benefit to advancing…

A giant, fully operational 16-bit computer that aims to demystify the strange and seemingly magical mechanisms of computation has been built by students and staff from the University of Bristol. The Big Hex Machine, specifically designed to explain how a computer works, has been built out of over 100 specially designed four-bit circuit boards and will…

Atoms, photons, and other quantum particles are often capricious and finicky by nature; very rarely at a standstill, they often collide with others of their kind. But if such particles can be individually corralled and controlled in large numbers, they may be harnessed as quantum bits, or qubits — tiny units of information whose state…

University of Canterbury Distinguished Professor Jack Copeland and UC alumni and composer Jason Long have restored the earliest known recording of computer-generated music, created more than 65 years ago using programming techniques devised by Alan Turing. In 1951, a BBC outside-broadcast unit in Manchester used a portable acetate disc cutter to capture three melodies played by a…