RSS Feed Source: MIT Technology Review

IBM announced detailed plans today to build an error-corrected quantum computer with significantly more computational capability than existing machines by 2028. It hopes to make the computer available to users via the cloud by 2029. 

The proposed machine, named Starling, will consist of a network of modules, each of which contains a set of chips, housed within a new data center in Poughkeepsie, New York. “We’ve already started building the space,” says Jay Gambetta, vice president of IBM’s quantum initiative.

IBM claims Starling will be a leap forward in quantum computing. In particular, the company aims for it to be the first large-scale machine to implement error correction. If Starling achieves this, IBM will have solved arguably the biggest technical hurdle facing the industry today to beat competitors including Google, Amazon Web Services, and smaller startups such as Boston-based QuEra and PsiQuantum of Palo

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Organizations are deepening their cloud investments at an unprecedented pace, recognizing its fundamental role in driving business agility and innovation. Synergy Research Group reports that companies spent $84 billion worldwide on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of 2024, a 23% rise over the third quarter of 2023 and the fourth consecutive quarter in which the year-on-year growth rate has increased.

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Allowing users to access IT systems from anywhere in the world, cloud services also ensure solutions remain highly configurable and automated.

At the same time, hosted services like generative AI and tailored industry solutions can help companies quickly launch applications and grow the business. To get the most out of these services, companies are turning to cloud optimization—the process of selecting and allocating cloud resources to reduce costs while maximizing performance.

But despite all the interest

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At first glance, the Bathhouse spa in Brooklyn looks not so different from other high-end spas. What sets it apart is out of sight: a closet full of cryptocurrency-­mining computers that not only generate bitcoins but also heat the spa’s pools, marble hammams, and showers. 

When cofounder Jason Goodman opened Bathhouse’s first location in Williamsburg in 2019, he used conventional pool heaters. But after diving deep into the world of bitcoin, he realized he could fit cryptocurrency mining seamlessly into his business. That’s because the process, where special computers (called miners) make trillions of guesses per second to try to land on the string of numbers that will earn a bitcoin, consumes tremendous amounts of electricity—which in turn produces plenty of heat that usually goes to waste. 

 “I thought, ‘That’s interesting—we need heat,’” Goodman says of Bathhouse. Mining facilities typically use fans or water

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As a child of an electronic engineer, I spent a lot of time in our local Radio Shack as a kid. While my dad was locating capacitors and resistors, I was in the toy section. It was there, in 1984, that I discovered the best toy of my childhood: the Armatron robotic arm. 

A drawing from the patent application for the Armatron robotic arm.COURTESY OF TAKARA TOMY

Described as a “robot-like arm to aid young masterminds in scientific and laboratory experiments,” it was the rare toy that lived up to the hype printed on the front of the box. This was a legit robotic arm. You could rotate the arm to spin around its base, tilt it up and down, bend it at the “elbow” joint, rotate the “wrist,” and open and close the bright-­orange articulated hand in elegant chords of

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