Science Daily isn’t talking about fiberoptics. They’re looking at the latest breakthroughs that take the “electrons” out of “electronics” by using photons to process information:

Scientists from the Group of Philip Walther from the Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna succeeded in prototyping a new and highly resource efficient model of a quantum computer — the boson sampling computer.

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The huge [...]

Wired (via CNN) is sizing up the new guy on the mound – a mechanical brain designed to outsmart pitchers:

Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a small humanoid robot that plays baseball — or something like it. The bot can hold a fan-like bat and take [...]

And, Wired says, about as thick, too. But this chip can still do everything a GPS can do… without the satellites:

At the University of Michigan on Wednesday, researchers for Darpa announced they’d created a very small chip containing a timing and inertial measurement unit, or TIMU, that’s as thick as a couple human hairs. When the satellites we rely [...]

New Scientist adds up the arguments over bitcoins, the computer-generated form of money. We’re now seeing plans to regulate the imaginary currency:

Virtual currencies are to be regulated by the US Treasury after the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) moved to clarify their status under anti-money-laundering laws.

The move comes as Bitcoins doubled in value in just a few [...]

New York Times has a pretty good profile of what could be the next big breakthrough in computing – the chips that understand “maybe”:

[A] powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common [...]

SONG: “Spirit of the Words” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on Computer program roots out ancestors of modern tongues”, Nature, 11 Feb 2013, as used in the post “’Bituqen’ is Proto-Polynesian for ‘star.’ A computer figured that out.”

ABSTRACT: I kinda knew I wanted to write a song about this story [...]

Nature reports on the algorithm researchers have devised to find (or recreate) the ancestors of modern languages:

Statistician Alexandre Bouchard-Côté of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and his co-workers say that by making the reconstruction of ancestral languages much simpler, their method should facilitate the testing of hypotheses about how languages evolve.

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Bouchard-Côté and colleagues’ method [...]

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An inside that is also an outside, as depicted in Python.

From

Smithsonian magazine is comparing computer pioneer Jaron Lanier – one of the people who, indirectly, made what you’re reading (and the way you’re reading it) possible – to a Cold War double agent. Because he’s turned against the web he helped create:

The colorful, prodigy-like persona of Jaron Lanier—he was in his early 20s when he helped make virtual [...]