3D manufacturing through 3D printer is great since you can create structures that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to create with classic manufacturing methods. However, 3D printers are still pretty slow, and no breakthrough is on sight, and mixing different materials is still tricky, particularly if you are …
Read More »ComputeStick
Computer chips have shrunk over the year but still we have been used to see a computer in terms of a substantial box or, in the last few years, in terms of a tablet. Clearly there are computers everywhere, our cell phone is a computer in a different form factor, …
Read More »The distance from imagination to creation
"At no other time has the distance between imagination and creation been so narrow". This is quite a statement and it really made me think. In the past we have had several people able to imagine something that was really out of the box. Something that was impossibile to turn …
Read More »That’s Innovation!
This is not about the future but about the past, about last year’s projects funded through Kickstarter. Well, in a way it is also about the future since those projects will be delivering in 2015. Kickstarter is magic, at least that is my feeling. They have been able to fund …
Read More »Has SDN reached the top of the hype curve?
2014 has been a great year for SDN, at least in terms of popularity… If you look on Google you find over 80 million pointers to SDN and in Google Trends it clearly show the uptake in 2013 and consolidation in 2014 and in the Gartner HypeCurve SDN is at the top (along …
Read More »Watch YouTube to learn your way…
It is not unusual for me to turn to YouTube to learn to do some specific task, be it the upgrading of RAM on my Mac or a food recipe. And I bet that goes for you as well. What is more unusual is to imagine a robot accessing YouTube …
Read More »Optogenetics lets scientists observe synapses at work
Optogenetics was theorised in 1999 and demonstrated in practice a few years later. It was listed in the breakthrough of the first decade of this century as a method opening the door to the visualisation of a living brain with an amazing spatial and temporal resolution. Using gene splicing technology …
Read More »It’s got easier to don’t understand Quantum Mechanics
Niels Bohr said once: "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it!" Indeed, quantum theory defies our reasoning and perception of reality. If you can measure something only within a certain approximation and yo would like a better one, well, you will have to look for …
Read More »Good news, bad news
Researchers at UCLA have discovered that memories are not stored into synoptical connections, as it was so far known. Synapses are clearly crucial in the memory mechanisms but they demonstrated that you can destroy synaptic connection among neurones, hence destroying the "memory" but if you are reconstructing the synaptic connection the memory comes back, …
Read More »Mimicking neurones in a chip
IBM announced a year ago Synapse, a chip that could mimic one million neurones and their connectivity (in a much limited scale) using over 5 billion transistors. It was tested in some activities that are typically well performed by a brain and poorly executed by a computer and indeed it showed …
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