New Storage Device Is Very Small, at 12 Atoms

Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.

The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will consume significantly less power. And they may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing. Full article

A Call to Rethink Internet Search

“We could soon view today’s keyword searching with the same nostalgia and amusement reserved for bygone technologies such as electric typewriters and vinyl records.”

So declares Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, in an essay published Thursday in the science journal Nature. (Available online to subscribers or for a single copy purchase of $32.)

The missing ingredients, he writes, are mainly the necessary investments in money and science by leading technology companies and universities. The better world of search, according to Mr. Etzioni, will be services that field spoken or typed questions and generate useful answers. Or, as he writes, “natural-language searching and answering, rather than providing the electronic equivalent of the index at the back of a reference book.”  Full story.

At Hewlett-Packard, Flexible Displays From the Future

Hewlett-Packard researchers are hard at work on a fully flexible display screen that they say can have all sorts of consumer and retail uses. Imagine candy bar wrappers, or screens as wallpaper, all made out of a flexible material that can change images in an instant.

Compared with today’s screens, which are made with glass and can easily break, these new displays could bring down the cost of consumer electronics and make gadgets more robust and bendable. The displays could also end up replacing hundreds of products that are currently made with paper and plastics. Full story.

Apple Sounds the PC Death Knell (or at least they’ve got the bell handy)

If Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, gets his way, the PC could be on its last legs.

For over two years now, Mr. Jobs and other Apple executives have been pushing the concept of a “post-PC era” where most people no longer have, or need, traditional computers and instead engage with the digital world though iPhones, iPods and iPads…

…”Once these new services begin later this fall, people who buy an iOS device can fully get by without a computer. They will no longer need to plug an iOS device into a PC to activate it; iCloud will automatically sync and backup people’s photos, music and documents. All software will be updated over the Internet.” Full story

The iPad in Your Hand: As Fast as a Supercomputer of Yore

It’s common wisdom that the computer you can hold in the palm of your hand today is as powerful as a computer from years ago that filled an entire room.

But now Jack Dongarra, one of the computer scientists who keeps track of the world’s 500 fastest computers, has figured out just how fast that computer in your palm really is.

Dr. Dongarra, who is on the computer science faculty at the University of Tennessee and a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is one of the keepers of the Linpack computing benchmark, a linear algebra test that measures  the mathematical capabilities of computers.

His research group has run the test on Apple’s new iPad 2, and it turns out that the legal-pad-size tablet would be a rival for a four-processor version of the Cray 2 supercomputer, which, with eight processors, was the world’s fastest computer in 1985.  Full story

Intel’s Thunderbolt–The Stealth Effort to Take Over Every Wire on Your Desk

Intel’s Light Peak data connection tech has evolved, and is now on sale in a real device–Apple’s new MacBook Pros. It’s clever, super-fast, and is actually a stealthy trick to replace the rats nest of wires on your desk with a new protocol, making USB (even the newly arrived USB 3.0) a thing of history.

Intel has, ahead of a press event later today, released its web page about the tech and it spares no effort to trumpet the benefits: “From the company with the fastest processors comes the fastest way to get information in and out of your PC and peripheral devices.” It’s a 10 gigabit-per-second data transfer protocol that gives “high-speed data and display transfers in each direction at the same time” all with a “single cable.”

Full story.

Apple Looks to a New Computing Era

Remember the floppy disk? I’m willing to bet Steve Jobs does. I’m also willing to bet he remembers when he killed it. It was 1998, to be precise, and the murder weapon was the new iMac, a computer that was missing the then-standard internal floppy drive. Last month Mr. Jobs rang the final death knell for another piece of technology: optical discs like DVDs and CDs.

For this execution, his weapon of choice is the new MacBook Air, with a little extra help from the iTunes store, of course.  During the unveiling of the new MacBook Air line, Mr. Jobs said these computers were next-generation laptops. This was reiterated in the commercials for the computers, in which a voiceover calls them “the next generation of Macbooks.”

In other words, don’t expect a DVD slot in your next Mac laptop, or your next desktop computer for that matter. Apple hopes to replace those discs with a fluffy white iCloud, where software, music, video and your own personal content fly around in the air like happy seagulls at the beach. Full story

“The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” (Book Review)

In “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” the technology writer Nicholas Carr extends this anxiety to the 21st century. The book begins with a melodramatic flourish, as Carr recounts the pleas of the supercomputer HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The machine is being dismantled, its wires unplugged: “My mind is going,” HAL says. “I can feel it.”

For Carr, the analogy is obvious: The modern mind is like the fictional computer. “I can feel it too,” he writes. “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” While HAL was silenced by its human users, Carr argues that we are sabotaging ourselves, trading away the seriousness of sustained attention for the frantic superficiality of the Internet. 

Full story continues here.

Chinese Supercomputer Is Ranked World’s Second-Fastest

Dawning 5000A , 2nd fastest supercomputer in the world.

A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked as the world’s second-fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China’s aggressive commitment to science and technology.

The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops — the equivalent of one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second — in the latest semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest 500 computers.

Full story continues here.

One Laptop Per Child Project Works With Marvell to Produce a $100 Tablet

The One Laptop Per Child project, which aims to give every child in the world a laptop, announced on Thursday that it was entering a partnership with Marvell, a computer chip and silicon manufacturer.

They agreed to work together to develop a new family of tablet computers for the project. The computers will be based on Moby, an existing platform built by Marvell. The partnership hopes to allow Marvell to sell inexpensive tablet computers for education and health care in the United States while helping to reduce the cost of the project’s computers for developing countries.

Full story here…