Computers

16 articles
  • polymetallic nodule_HERO

    A New Threat to Oceans: Deep-Sea Mining for Precious Metals

    Around 500 miles southeast of the bright turquoise waters at Honolulu Harbor, and two and a half miles down to the dark ocean floor, a massive carpet of potato-sized rocks stretches thousands of miles on the seabed. These rocks, called polymetallic, or manganese, nodules, are made up of manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt. The nodules’ […]
  • MONIAC American machine diagram

    The Rube Goldberg Machine That Mastered Keynesian Economics

    While researching my soon-to-be-released biography on John Horton Conway, an iconoclastic and very influential mathematician at Princeton, I organized a research trip to his native England. We visited with Conway’s elder sister, Joan, in Liverpool, and convened a reunion at his alma mater, Cambridge. We met there with a few of his “sum chums,” his co-authors […]
  • messy wires hero

    Why Our Genome and Technology Are Both Riddled With “Crawling Horrors”

    “Add little to little and there will be a big pile.” —Ovid When we build complex technologies, despite our best efforts and our desire for clean logic, they often end up being far messier than we intend. They often end up kluges: inelegant solutions that work just well enough. And a reason they end up being […]
  • diffusion mri hagmann

    The Big Problem With “Big Science” Ventures—Like the Human Brain Project

    The National Institutes of Health’s “Human Connectome Project” aims to elucidate the architecture of nerve fibers in the brain, as illustrated here. Patric Hagmann, Department of Radiology, University Hospital Lausanne (CHUV), Switzerland In 2005 neuroscientist Henry Markram embarked on a mission to create a supercomputer simulation of the human brain, known as the Blue Brain […]
  • call of duty advanced warfare

    Thank You for Buying “Call of Duty” & Helping to Fight Cancer!

    No still image can show the amazing realism of the Call of Duty games—but this can give you an idea.Activision If you’ve seen the latest ads for the video game Call of Duty, they are almost guaranteed to have left an impression. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . First-person […]
  • crash bandicoot

    Will You Be Able to Read this Article in 1,000 Years?

    If you ask Anthony Weiner, digital records—especially those on the Internet—can seem impossibly hard to get rid of. When a picture or document is reduced to a series of 1s and 0s, it becomes transmissible, reproducible, downloadable, and storable. You can’t burn digital books, and ideas like cloud computing make it possible to back up […]

  • HAL 9000

    Will Humans Be Able to Control Computers That Are Smarter Than Us?

    Let’s consider the fear that once surrounded another powerful technology: recombinant DNA.

  • IBM RAMAC 305 hero

    The Brilliant “Baloney Slicer” That Started the Digital Age

    In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force Supply Depot in Ohio was looking for a faster way to store and fetch information from its sizable inventory. They had 50,000 items in their records and wanted instant access to each one of them. The dominant storage technologies of the time—punch cards, magnetic tape and magnetic […]

  • Alan Turing sculpture Bletchley Park Stephen Kettle

    Goodbye, Turing Test; Bring on the Turing Decathlon

    A statue of Alan Turing by sculptor Stephen Kettle made entirely of pieces of slate. The statue depicts Turing working on an Enigma machine, which the Nazis used to encode messages, and is located at Bletchley Park, the British-government site where Turing and colleagues did their code-breaking. Photo by Richard Gillin via Flickr How many […]

  • Popkin_HERO

    Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird

    Never mind tablet computers. Wait till you see bubbles and slime mold.

  • Article Image

    The Minds & Algorithms That Make Hollywood Spectacle

    We may not have realized it at the time, but during the 1990s, Hollywood movies were infiltrated by a new presence that outshined even the biggest screen stars: Images created on computers became the main draws for movies like Jurassic Park, Toy Story, The Matrix, and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Since then, […]

  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    Osmos, a Physics Game Where It’s Survival of the Fattest

    A screenshot from Osmos showing the player’s mote bright blue mote surrounded by smaller blue bubbles, which you can eat, and larger red blobs, which can eat you. In an era when fashion demands thinness, the video game Osmos, in which the goal is attaining ever greater levels of corpulence, stands as a rare exception. […]
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    Preserving Yesterday’s Tech to Get a Better Grasp on Today’s

    In 2009, more than 47 million computers in the U.S. were ready for “end-of-life management”—so hopelessly outmoded that no reasonable amount of refurbishment could redeem them. Market-driven innovation, thus far hewing to the demanding prediction of Moore’s law, means that every few months, the gadgets in our pockets and on our desktops are pushed closer […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    A Computer Program That Hacks Language & Exposes US Secrets

    One of the most significant effects of the ongoing NSA surveillance scandal is that it drew so much attention to the massive secret, official world that’s grown up in the US since the 9/11 attacks. These clandestine operations have undergone a dramatic recent expansion, though there is of course a long history of clandestine activity […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    In Art Made From the Digital, Its Imperfections Are Revealed

    Postcards from Google Earth (one of five images in the collection)Clement Valla A wave of digital art, and its acceptance in the mainstream art world, has been building since computer technologies entered people’s lives over 20 years ago. Just last year, MoMA acquired 14 video games for its collection. Now comes the first-ever auction of […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    Will We Reverse-Engineer the Human Brain Within 50 Years?

    Gary Marcus can’t understand why people are shocked when he calls the brain a computer. The 43-year-old professor of psychology at New York University, author of Kluge, about the haphazard evolution of the brain, and a leading researcher in how children acquire language, grins and says it’s a generational thing.“I know there’s a philosophical school of dualism […]