Hot on the heels of the 20 Petaflops Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the recently crowned world’s fastest supercomputer, Cray has announced the XC30 architecture, which will allow for the creation of supercomputers that break 100 Petaflops – 100 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.
We experimentally demonstrate a class of tractor beams created by coherently superposing coaxial Bessel beams. These optical conveyors have periodic intensity variations along their axes that act as highly effective optical traps for micrometer-scale objects. Varying the Bessel beams' relative phase shifts the traps axially thereby selectively transports trapped objects either downstream or upstream along the length of the beam.
The Federal Trade Commission has issued a staff report on best practices for companies using facial recognition technology in their businesses.
"Fortunately, the commercial use of facial recognition technologies is still young," the report states. "This creates a unique opportunity to ensure that as this industry grows, it does so in a way that respects the privacy interests of consumers while preserving the beneficial uses the technology has to offer.”
Apple's new iMac announcement today included an interesting bit of information on an upcoming technology Apple calls "Fusion Drive." According to Phil Schiller this morning, the technology takes a relatively small solid state disk and a relatively large spinning hard disk drive, then "fuses" them together into a single drive.
It’s no secret that phone displays are getting big—much bigger than they used to be. The iPhone got bumped up a notch (from 3.5 inches to 4 inches), Nokia’s Lumia display is gargantuan (4.3 inches), and some of the Android phones launching this quarter come with 4.7-inch displays.
The Compact Disc format changed the way we listened to music in the 1980s. Sony's first player, the CDP-101, went on sale on October 1, 1982, in Japan, and six months later here in the U.S. At $1,000 it was pretty expensive, but supplies were limited, so every one sold for full price.
Tiburon, a small but wealthy town just northeast of the Golden Gate Bridge, has an unusual distinction: it was one of the first towns in the country to mount automated license plate readers (LPRs) at its city borders—the only two roads going in and out of town. Effectively, that means the cops are keeping an eye on every car coming and going.
A contentious plan? Not in Tiburon, where the city council approved the cameras unanimously back in November 2009.
At a signing ceremony at the Google headquarters on Tuesday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law state legislation that officially makes the Golden State the second in the nation to legalize and regulate autonomous cars.
Google, of course, has already developed a fleet of a dozen cars (mostly modified Toyota Priuses) and has already logged over 300,000 miles of autonomous driving on state roads.
For the last half a decade now, the mobile industry has largely arranged itself around the announcements of Apple’s iPhones. These devices set the standard for what a phone could and should be. At the same time, Android, webOS, and Windows Phone struggled to get off the ground, with widely varying levels of success. The freshly launched iPhone 5 is undeniably the best iPhone yet (as Apple likes to say), but in many ways it feels like Apple is spinning its wheels at the worst possible time.
Here we are at Day 1 of Intel Developer Forum witnessing some fabulous proof-of-concept designs. The first concept to really catch our eye is Intel’s “Display without Boundaries”, where Intel turns any surface into a fully capable multi-touch screen. That means you can turn any wall, table, or item into a touch-screen device that recognizes multitouch gestures and actions as smoothly as iPad.
