Category Technology/Electronics

Some physical injuries and neurological conditions can temporarily or permanently impair movement, leaving some people unable to speak, type on keyboards or use electronic devices. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), systems that can decode brain activity patterns and convert them into computer commands or written text, could be of great value for paralyzed patients.

Despite their potential, most of the best-performing BCIs developed ...

IBM and researchers from the University of Chicago announced a demonstration in quantum computing that meets the fundamental criteria for “quantum advantage”—the point where quantum computers can be confirmed to have outperformed classical computers on trusted computations.

The collaboration said its system had performed computations beyond the reach of leading classical simulation methods while providing confidence that the computation returned accurate results.

In their new paper, the researchers showed th...

Most electronic memory storage devices require the ability to trap large numbers of electrons for each bit of memory. In an ideal world, however, it would take only one electron. This would reduce space requirements and power consumption for devices. Now, a team in China has realized this goal with an ultrathin device capable of minimizing the stray capacitance that plagued earlier attempts. The new study, published in Science, describes how this novel device has overcome challenges in implementing the single-electron design.

The capacitance problem
In theory, each time an electron is added or removed, it should create a distinct, step-like change in a transistor’s switching volt...

The capabilities of large AI systems are constantly improving, but they consume a great deal of energy during training and operation. The human brain, by contrast, is extremely energy-efficient: It requires only around 20 watts.

Researchers at Graz University of Technology, in collaboration with international partners, have developed a novel brain-inspired AI model that can plan flexibly and solve complex problems. In doing so, it consumes significantly less energy than multilayer neural networks or large language models. The study is published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

“The brain works in a completely different way from tod...