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When playing with Cozmo, Anki’s  palm-sized artificial intelligence robot , it’s easy to forgot all of the engineering and software running behind the scenes. Every action, from Cozmo’s audible chirps of victory when it wins a game to its childlike mannerisms when it recognizes your face, conceals tens of thousands of lines of code. While Cozmo sleeps, it snores. The small robot — shaped like a miniaturized bulldozer with a CRT monitor for a cockpit — sits in a charging dock, waiting to be awoken. Like Pixar’s adorably anthropomorphic WALL-E, Cozmo falls somewhere between a Mars rover and an animated woodland creature. It’s lifelike enough to evoke sympathy, but still enough of a toy not to teeter too close to the uncanny valley.  With the tap of a smartphone screen, Cozmo comes to life. It makes a subtle motion to indicate it’s shaking off its slumber and begins wheeling over to the edge of the table. When it gets too close, it slams to a halt and looks down over ...

Work on phase change memory (PCM) conducted by a team based at Stanford University in the US suggests the technology could store data far more quickly than previously thought, as well as providing non volatility. Until now, PCM was thought to switch in nanoseconds, however Stanford’s work has brought a new understanding.  IBM announced a more efficient way to use phase-change memory, a breakthrough that could help transition electronic devices from standard RAM and flash to a much faster and more reliable type of storage. Phase-change memory, or PCM, is a type of non-volatile optical storage that works by manipulating the behavior of chalcogenide glass, which is how data is stored on rewriteable Blue-ray discs. A electrical current is applied to change PCM cells from an amorphous to crystalline structure, allowing you to store 0s and 1s in either state while the application of low voltage can read the data back. The issue in the past has been PCM's limited capacity and...

Here comes the terabit per second network,In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has redefined broadband as being at least 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. While some moronic senators think that's too fast, everyone else knows it's way too slow. The technical problem is the demand for broadband has grown ever higher -- thanks Netflix -- while the Internet backbones can't keep up with the demand.  Until now. Today, Internet backbone connections tend to run at 40 Gigabits (Gb) per second, while 100Gb is becoming more common. That's good, but that's not good enough. Fortunately, new research projects point the way to the terabit (Tb) Internet.  First, the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) has developed a laser that can quadruple internet speeds. The project's chief scientist, Amnon Yariv, claims that this new improved laser is "capable of a 4x increase in the number of bytes-per-second carried by each channel...

iOS and Android are great, but they each have their own rules and policies that  certainly inhibit the creative efforts of developers. Mozilla has since decided to build a new mobile operating system from scratch, one that will focus on true openness, freedom and user choice. It’s Firefox OS. Firefox OS is built on Gonk, Gecko and Gaia software layers – for the rest of us, it means it is built on open source, and it carries web technologies such as HTML5and CSS3. Firefox OS is designed to provide a complete, community-based alternative operating system, for running web applications directly or those installed from an application marketplace.  The applications use open standards and approaches such as JavaScript and HTML5, a robust privilege model, open web APIs that can communicate directly with hardware, e.g. cellphone hardware. As such, it competes with commercially developed operating systems such as Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Phone...

Speculations about  Xiaomi  opening another front in its battle against Apple and Lenovo Group have been doing rounds since quite sometime.  The news comes courtesy DigiTimes which is claiming that Taiwan-based contract notebook maker Inventec will manufacture Xiaomi's 12.5-inch laptops at its Shanghai factory and that the laptops will be ready for shipping by April 2016.  The Chinese company threw in a huge surprise by launching its first-ever laptop line, the Mi Notebook Air, running on Windows 10. It comes in two sizes -- the powerful 13.3-inch and the portable 12.5-inch -- and both feature a slim body, a 1080p display with slim under-glass bezels (while still managing to fit in a 1-megapixel webcam), a backlit keyboard, a USB Type-C charging port plus a minimalistic metallic design -- in gold or silver, naturally -- with no logo on the outside. The best part of all? The top-spec model costs just 4,999 yuan or about $750.   The ...

cells to remember and respond to series of stimuli New approach to biological circuit design enables scientists to track cell histories. Synthetic biology allows researchers to program cells to perform novel functions such as fluorescing in response to a particular chemical or producing drugs in response to disease markers. In a step toward devising much more complex cellular circuits, MIT engineers have now programmed cells to remember and respond to a series of events.   These cells can remember, in the correct order, up to three different inputs, but this approach should be scalable to incorporate many more stimuli, the researchers say. Using this system, scientists can track cellular events that occur in a particular order, create environmental sensors that store complex histories, or program cellular trajectories. “You can build very complex computing systems if you integrate the element of memory together with computation,” says Timothy Lu, an associate pr...