Mattel recently announced that it will release a US$300 3D printer for kids in time for the 2016 holiday season. With accompanying software that is specially tailored for young toy designers, the ThingMaker promises to introduce a new generation of innovators to the up-and-coming world of 3D printing. Known in technology circles as "additive manufacturing," 3D printing has grown into a $4 billion industry since it was first commercialized 30 years ago by 3D Systems. For most of its history, though, it has been out of the reach of typical consumers. Most industrial-scale 3D printing machines cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and fabricate parts with materials that cost orders of magnitude more than those used in most consumer products.

Rescue dog Gonta, outfitted with a GPS-enabled backpack but driven by his own innate sense of smell, jumps onto a pile of collapsed rubble to find buried survivors. Though just a drill, the intensity of the Brittany spaniel in scouring the mound of broken concrete highlights the key role of sniffer dogs in saving lives when buildings collapse, such as in earthquakes or explosions. Ten-year-old Gonta helped search for survivors after the massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011—back then he, like other rescue dogs, relied on their olfactory instincts to look for survivors. But now a Japanese researcher says he has developed an idea that uses technology to augment nature—to increase the chance of finding people as the clock ticks down.

Combinatorial tasks are among the hardest for traditional computers. A good example is finding the optimum path through a large complicated network. Every possible path must be evaluated and as datasets grow the computing time grows exponentially making some tasks unfeasible. One practical example is verification of VLSI (very large scale integrated) semiconductor circuit design. Indeed, many VLSI circuit designs are never ‘fully verified’ because the combinatorial calculation is prohibitively time-consuming and instead rely on approximations.

The lifetime of the computer has been marked by an ongoing struggle to communicate with the machine. When two human conversational participants come from different languages, true communication only occurs when one can learn to speak in the language of the other. At the beginning of the history of computation, it was the human who had to use the language of the machine; early programmers expressed themselves in binary. But over time, we built better interfaces. Binary machine code was replaced by languages employing commands that took the form of words. Typed command-line interfaces gave way to graphical interfaces and abstractions of file systems that suggested physical space. Commands took the form of mouse or swipe gestures.

New wireless technology makes it possible for monkeys to control a robotic wheelchair using just their thoughts, without the need for EEG electrodes on the scalp or wires connecting to an external computer. Developed by neuroscientists at Duke University, the new brain-machine interface relies instead on hair-thin microfilaments implanted in two regions of the monkeys' brains. Using those microfilaments, the wireless BMI -- a device that gets affixed to the monkey's head -- simultaneously records signals from hundreds of neurons in both regions. As the monkeys think about moving toward their goal, computers translate their brain activity into real-time operation of the wheelchair.

Co-Design is a collaborative effort among industry thought leaders, academia, and manufacturers to reach Exascale performance by taking a holistic system-level approach to fundamental performance improvements. Co-Design architecture enables all active system devices to become acceleration devices by orchestrating a more effective mapping of communication between devices in the system. This produces a well-balanced architecture across the various compute elements, networking, and data storage infrastructures that exploits system efficiency and even reduces power consumption.

What are the prime factors, or multipliers, for the number 15? Most grade school students know the answer -- 3 and 5 -- by memory. A larger number, such as 91, may take some pen and paper. An even larger number, say with 232 digits, can (and has) taken scientists two years to factor, using hundreds of classical computers operating in parallel. Because factoring large numbers is so devilishly hard, this "factoring problem" is the basis for many encryption schemes for protecting credit cards, state secrets, and other confidential data. It's thought that a single quantum computer may easily crack this problem, by using hundreds of atoms, essentially in parallel, to quickly factor huge numbers.

Carbon dioxide gets a bad rap. Out of all the waste gases produced by human activity -- manufacturing, agriculture, electricity production, transportation -- carbon dioxide is the biggest byproduct and is fingered as the leading culprit behind global warming. In fact, it accounts for 76% of all annual global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But Emily Cole doesn't focus on the negatives. The 32-year-old scientist has created technology that would recycle carbon dioxide into something extremely useful.

A new book – Kicking Butt in Computer Science: Women in Computing at Carnegie Mellon University – contends changing the culture of computer science departments is the critical element in attracting more women to computer science and helping them succeed. Curriculum changes are not enough. Indeed, a cultural makeover at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, a top-ranked computer science program, is a major reason the school consistently attracts and graduates a higher percentage of female computer science students than the national average, according to authors Carol Frieze and Jeria Quesenberry.

Ciliates can do amazing things: Being so tiny, the water in which they live is like thick honey to these microorganisms. In spite of this, however, they are able to self-propel through water by the synchronized movement of thousands of extremely thin filaments on their outer skin, called cilia. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart are now moving robots that are barely perceptible to the human eye in a similar manner through liquids. For these microswimmers, the scientists are neither employing complex driving elements nor external forces such as magnetic fields.

Neural networks are often used for image recognition, but it turns out they can create some pretty incredible images as well. The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts and Research at Google hosted "Deep Dream," a special exhibit and auction in San Francisco featuring artwork made using neural networks. To create the works on display, artists first trained neural networks to distinguish objects and parse them into high-level components using natural images from the environment. Once trained, the networks were told to “imagine” new images based on the rules and associations they had learned.

Boeing says it's created the lightest metal ever, a microlattice material which it describes as 99.99% air. Weight savings are crucially important in aircraft manufacturing, since a lighter aircraft requires less fuel, which is airlines' largest operating expense. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner was a breakthrough commercial jet because it used light-weight composite carbon fiber material, rather than aluminum, to generate the best fuel efficiency in its class. The microlattice looks like a sponge or a mesh, and is simultaneously flexible and very strong, according to Boeing. Should it become widely used, Boeing said the material could help airlines save huge amounts of money.

Have you ever had those days when you just can't focus? One minute you're completely immersed in a work assignment, the next you're messaging your friends in a group chat and catching up on online showbiz gossip while watching videos of dogs chasing their own tails. The end result is you get nothing done and you're left feeling incredibly frustrated. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone and it may not be entirely your fault. Many experts believe our brains aren't prepared for the rapidly growing bundle of digital distractions that we are bombarded with, leaving us feeling sluggish and ultimately less productive. What we are facing is a very 21st Century problem.

A trio of partner projects based in Europe – Exanest, Exanode and Ecoscale – are working in close collaboration to develop the building blocks for an exascale architecture prototype that will, as they describe, put the power of ten million computers into a single supercomputer. The effort is unique in seeking to advance the ARM64 + FPGA architecture as a foundational “general-purpose” exascale platform. Funded for three years as part of Europe’s Horizon2020 program, the partners are coordinating their efforts with the goal of building an early “straw man” prototype late this year that will consist of more than one-thousand energy-efficient ARM cores, reconfigurable logic, plus advanced storage, memory, cooling and packaging technologies.

The robotics industry, spurred on by demand in new markets and increasing labor costs, is expected to show strong growth through the rest of the decade, according to analyst firm IDC. Worldwide spending on robotics, as well as related services, is expected to jump from a $71 billion market in 2015 to $135.4 billion in 2019, IDC said. "Robotics is one of the core technologies that is enabling significant change in manufacturing through factory-of-the-future initiatives,” said Jing Bing Zhang, a research director at IDC. “While traditionally used in the automotive industry, there is an increasing adoption of robotics in sectors like electronics, retail, healthcare, logistics, agriculture, services, education and government."

Both the private and the federated clouds are attempts to solve the same two scientific problems: how can academic institutions with limited budgets afford the compute power necessary to analyse the huge data sets produced by modern science; and how can they share these data sets efficiently, without having to replicate them many times? The two projects exemplify the recent surge of interest in high-performance cloud computing.

Imagine walking on Mars and being able to examine rock formations from all angles, or collaborating on the same 3D hologram design with someone thousands of miles away. Or imagine being able to diagnose and treat the diseases of people half way around the world while you remain in your clinic, or walking around a gallery and having your own holographic guide pointing things out to you on your smart glasses. These are just some of the exciting examples of what "augmented reality" (AR) technology is beginning to offer us.

Facebook researchers, engineers and product teams have spent more than a year preparing Reactions for launch. They worked with sociologists, consulted focus groups and conducted surveys to determine which emotions would make the final cut. They looked at the most popular stickers and emojis on the platform for clues too. According to product manager Sammi Krug, narrowing down the set of possible responses and making sure the emoji faces would be "universally understood and equally useful" were the two of the biggest challenges.

The substance that provides energy to all the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate, may also be able to power the next generation of supercomputers. The discovery opens doors to the creation of biological supercomputers that are about the size of a book. That is what an international team of researchers led by Prof. Nicolau, the Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill, believe. They've published an article on the subject earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which they describe a model of a biological computer that they have created that is able to process information very quickly and accurately using parallel networks in the same way that massive electronic super computers do.

Combining electronics and photonics on semiconductor microchips to speed data transmission isn’t a new idea – the potential for better performance and power reduction are enticing. However thorny manufacturing issues have so far limited widespread use of this approach. That could change soon according to a recent report in Nature and would have have broad implications extending even to efforts to achieve exascale computing, say the authors.

Predictive analytics can already help prevent churn and anticipate equipment failures, but MIT has applied it to a new realm altogether: protecting ships at sea from so-called "rogue waves." Also known as killer waves, rogue waves swell up seemingly out of nowhere and can be eight times higher than the surrounding sea. They can strike in otherwise calm waters with virtually no warning, causing untold devastation even to large ships and ocean liners. Now, MIT has developed a predictive tool it says can give ships and their crews a two- to three-minute advanced warning, allowing them to shut down essential operations on a ship or offshore platform.

Our fear and disgust that cockroaches can quickly squeeze through the tiniest cracks are well justified, say University of California, Berkeley scientists. Not only can they squish themselves to get into one-tenth-of-an-inch crevices, but once inside they can run at high speed even when flattened in half. These are just a couple of the creepy findings from a UC Berkeley study of how American cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) penetrate the tightest joints and seams in less than a second. What the researchers found has inspired a robot that can rapidly squeeze through cracks -- a new capability for search-and-rescue in rubble resulting from tornados, earthquakes and explosions.

The legal profession is perhaps more associated with bulging files of papers, odd clothing and arcane procedures than with technological innovation. But several start-ups are trying to give this most conservative - and sometimes vexing - of professions a digital makeover. Basha Rubin, for example, co-founded New York's Priori Legal, an online marketplace that connects lawyers with businesses, after she perceived that there were too many obstacles in the way of businesses trying to find legal services. Lawyers listed on Priori Legal are vetted by the company and have to have five years of relevant practice experience and good references. The lawyers are also interviewed face-to-face or via Skype.

A drug-free alternative to treat Parkinson's disease tremors could be on the horizon -- in the form of a glove. There is currently no cure for Parkinson's disease, a degenerative neurological condition that is estimated to affect between 7 and ten million people worldwide, according to the Parkinson's Disease Foundation. The condition manifests itself mostly through tremors that often make hands shake uncontrollably, impacting the daily lives of sufferers. While medications are a valid early treatment, they progressively become less effective and come with several side effects. The proposed GyroGlove uses the laws of physics -- rather than chemistry -- to stabilize a patient's hand and control tremors mechanically.

Putting back doors into any software, even once, is just asking for trouble. We could argue endlessly over the legal, political and technical fine points of the FBI getting a court order requiring Apple to assist it in cracking open a locked iPhone 5C. That’s not really the point. True, Apple has cheerfully helped the government look into customers’ data before. No, the FBI isn’t asking for an iPhone backdoor — this time. All Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California really wants is for Apple to provide a one-off, signed iOS image that will enable the FBI to try different iOS 9 passcodes quickly without triggering the iPhone’s auto-erasure feature after 10 failed attempts.