Computing Power Scientists have succeeded in a 40-year-long quest to create electronic components that “remember” their state after the power has been switched off. This will result in computers that start up instantly and retain sessions if the battery dies, and cellphones that go for weeks without charge. Two such “memristors” linked together function as […]

This is the second issue of a slimmed-down Digest. In it, we focus on advances in computing and communications, technologies likely particularly to affect health futures given that their existing (never mind their potential future) capabilities have been largely untapped. The one computing and communications device that just about every doctor and patient happily uses […]

We have predicted elsewhere that the virtual world called Second Life (or something like it) will eventually become a serious venue for health care services and delivery. IBM seems to think along similar lines, and is investigating how to bridge between the real and virtual worlds. A key link in that bridge would be more […]

Expect another massive leap in consumer computing power (and further validation of Moore’s Law) as breakthrough chips hit the market later this year. Hewlett-Packard will also be abiding by Moore’s Law in about a year from now, when it puts nanoengineered chips into its printers. Moore’s Law can also be seen behind the development of […]

The acceleration of change in healthcare is driven to a large extent by the acceleration in computing and communication technologies. Spurts will soon come from: A collaboration between US healthcare’s leading IT association and the next-generation Internet2 consortium to explore the use of Internet2 for private, secure, and very fast health information exchange; and A […]

We have predicted elsewhere that the virtual world called Second Life (or something like it) will eventually become a serious venue for health care services and delivery. IBM seems to think along similar lines, and is investigating how to bridge between the real and virtual worlds. A key link in that bridge would be more […]

You can already buy the products of spintronics research in memory devices. The tiny USB drive that carries gigabytes of data is an example. Now, spintronics is set to be applied to computing itself. Even before that breakthrough is applied, the exponential rise in the power of supercomputers continues. Close to half a petaflop is […]

Semiconductor industry analysts see gloom in the cost of etching silicon circuits at reducing nanoscale. Yet, even absent breakthroughs in exotic forms of computing, workarounds such as the “multicore” processors introduced by Sun and AMD (and soon to be joined by Intel and IBM) will keep Moore’s Law alive in effect if not in the […]

It’s been your average couple of months in computing and communications since our last issue, with an orders-of-magnitude improvement in amplifiers and silicon chips, key advances toward optical silicon chips, molecular transistors, and nanoscale mechanical memory, and Japan’s announced intention to built a 10 petaflop supercomputer by 2010. Next Generation Wireless Source article MIT researchers […]

Field trials have begun of a technology that turns your body into a local area network connecting the electronic gadgets you carry around with each other — and with any other gadgets or gadgeted people you touch. This technology makes sense enough to be our likely, and near, future. IBM and others are racing to […]