Utkarsh - The Contragravity

Controlling your device just with your eyes !! Sounds pretty cool isn't it? “In the past year eye tracking technology moved from being a promising technology to being adopted in commercial products in a wide array of consumer segments simultaneously,” says Oscar Werner, vice president of the eye tracking company Tobii Tech. Although the concept of eye tracking isn't new but the past year saw a rising interest in the technology with many startups and roll-out of devices and software that supports eye tracking. There’s a chance that soon eye tracking will be a standard feature of a new generation of smartphones, laptops and desktop monitors setting the stage for a huge re-evaluation of the way we communicate with devices—or how they communicate with us. Less expensive and more potent hardware, new open source software platforms and new easier and faster ways of obtaining data, used to train algorithm models, have driven the progress in eye tracking technology. ...

“ “ Go, go!” was the thought racing through Grégoire Courtine’s mind. The French neuroscientist was watching a macaque monkey as it hunched aggressively at one end of a treadmill. His team had used a blade to slice halfway through the animal’s spinal cord, paralyzing its right leg. Now Courtine wanted to prove he could get the monkey walking again. To do it, he and colleagues had installed a recording device beneath its skull, touching its motor cortex, and sutured a pad of flexible electrodes around the animal’s spinal cord, below the injury. A wireless connection joined the two electronic devices. The result: a system that read the monkey’s intention to move and then transmitted it immediately in the form of bursts of electrical stimulation to its spine. Soon enough, the monkey’s right leg began to move. Extend and flex. Extend and flex. It hobbled forward. “The monkey was thinking, and then boom, it was walking,” recalls an exultant Courtine, a professor with Switzerland’s Éco...

IBM has announced a milestone in its race against Google and other big tech firms to build a powerful quantum computer. Dario Gil, who leads IBM's quantum computing and artificial intelligence research division, said that the company's scientists have successfully built and measured a processor prototype with 50 quantum bits, known as qubits.  Quantum computing, a technology that is still in its early phases, uses the quirks of quantum physics to perform calculations at far higher speeds than current computers. IBM still has glitches to work out but the 50-qubit announcement is a sign of significant progress. While technologies like AI can find pattern buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be found and the number of possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous ever to be processed by classical computers.  A quantum computer is a comp...

The World Once Laughed at North Korean Cyberpower.  No More. North Korea is country that believes peace can only be made when the enemy surrenders. In recent years North Korea has grown to be the most feared nation, not only in nuclear attacks but cyber warfare as well. Here’s a look at some of the biggest attacks put forth by North Korean agencies on the world. WannaCry On May 12, 2017, organizations across the world reported ransomware infections affecting their computer systems. The infections, caused by a ransomware strain referred to as WannaCry, restrict users' access to a computer until a ransom is paid to unlock it. Reportedly, 300,000 users in at least 150 countries were affected by the ransomware. In April 2017, an anonymous online group known as the Shadow Brokers released what it alleged was a series of surveillance-enabling tools stolen from the National Security Agency (NSA) that, among other things, exploited a Microsoft Windows security vulner...

IBM scientists have successfully made a new world record by storing 330 terabytes of data on a single magnetic tape. 330 terabytes of data are equivalent to the data stored by almost 330 million books. The record is of storing 221 gigabits per square inch which are almost 20 times more data density as stored by currently used devices. In earlier times, to store megabytes of data drum like space was required. Today the technology of compressed data has evolved to such an extent that the data could be stored on a magnetic tape. This tape would fit with the length of our palm. This tape has punches that increase its data density up to 20 times more than the devices used today. This punch card magnetic slip is re-writable. This invention would probably give a thousand-fold increase in the data storage density. In this nanotechnology, holes are drilled in a plastic which has 10 nanometers of spacing. This tape has punches that increase its data density up to 20 times more than the d...