Technology

The traditional method of imaging, which is at least 150 years old, relies on a lens to create an image and a device for recording photons such as an array of pixels, a light-sensitive film or even a retina.

But a dramatic revolution that is currently taking the world of imaging by storm means that this could soon change.

This revolution is based on a technique called compressive sensing, which is based on the idea that many common measurements have huge redundancy. That means it’s possible to acquire the same data with just a fraction of carefully chosen measurements.

This week, a new paper described how researchers pieced together the entire molecular structure of the protein shell of the HIV virus using GPU-based simulations. This remarkable achievement not only paves the way for new therapeutic approaches to AIDs, but establishes GPUs as franchise players in molecular simulation.

I like the idea of electric cars. Heck, I've driven them, and downright enjoyed doing so. The inner geek within me yearns for a car that makes no noise other than a suppressed electric whine, and that glides down the highway like something out of a futuristic sci-fi movie or Knight Rider.

So let's just get this out of the way: I do not hate electric cars. In fact I think they are awesomely cool, and are an incredible technical achievement.

Why does Bitcoin work? Fraudsters should have left it in cinders years ago, and might have done, if it wasn’t for two things: spam and the Byzantine Empire.

A Bitcoin is basically an entry in a ledger that is distributed across a network of computers. Bitcoins are transferred between parties by noting the transaction in the ledger. This might sound just like any other banking system except there’s a crucial difference: no one is in charge of the ledger.

With so many incredible advances in mobile technology, it can sometimes feel like progress in battery technology isn't exactly keeping up. While our mobile devices can do so much more today than simply make calls and send text messages, many of us often struggle to get through the day on a single battery charge when we make full use of our handset’s capabilities.

Quantenna today announced an 802.11ac Wi-Fi chipset that pushes 1.7Gbps of data over four wireless streams.

The first chips based on the 802.11ac standard hit 1.3Gbps last year by creating three streams of 433Mbps each. (With the older 802.11n standard, the maximum throughput for a single stream is 150Mbps.) Quantenna's QSR1000 chips based on 802.11ac are thus a minor evolution over what was already available, using Multi-user MIMO technology with four spatial streams to hit 1.7Gbps.

Is there anything more annoying than infrastructure that turns on you?

For years we've been warned about the specter of hacker-induced nuclear power plant meltdowns, breached electric-grid control systems or Samsung TVs that let hackers watch you. We've even heard we could lose our data to juicejacking, when all we want is an emergency phone charge.

Google has an image of the future of search, and it's a bit sci-fi.

Google developers envision users talking to their computers much like the characters on Star Trek did. Want to know where the closest grocery store, or planet system, is? Simply speak your question to the computer. And it will speak its answer to you.

Anointed the next Steve Jobs by some admirers, Twitter inventor and Square CEO Jack Dorsey is one of the few people who can get the Silicon Valley press corps to roll out of bed early to hear what he has to say. Unlike Jobs, Dorsey spoke from a table at Blue Bottle Coffee near Square’s San Francisco headquarters, not the stage of the convention center down the street. Also unlike Jobs, he didn’t announce a product that at first glance seemed ready to detonate our digital lives and rearrange the pieces in a fundamentally new way.

Instead, Dorsey unveiled a cash register stand.

Barclays Wealth & Investment Management is using Nuance's FreeSpeech voice biometrics solution to automatically confirm and identify customers, instead of using security questions that rely on the customer's ability to remember a number of different details.

Security questions—often referred to as "knowledge-based authentication"—can be time-consuming and frustrating for customers that have to provide often hard-to-recall information on obscure topics.