The TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation introduced millions of people to the idea of a holodeck: an immersive, realistic 3D holographic projection of a complete environment that you could interact with and even touch. In the 21st century, holograms arealready being usedin avariety of wayssuch as medical systems, education, art, security, and defense. Scientists are stilldeveloping waysto use lasers, modern digital processors, and motion-sensing technologies to create severaldifferent types of hologramsthat could change the way we interact....

Have you ever imagined your smartphone or tablet without a touchscreen? This could soon be the case if we run out of indium, one of the rarest minerals on Earth. Indium is used in many high-tech devices such as touch screens, smartphones, solar panels, and smart windows, in the form of indium tin oxide. This compound is optically transparent and electrically conductive — the two crucial features required for touch screens to work....

Intel’s AI division is one of the unsung heroes of the modern machine-learning movement. It’s talented researchers have advanced the state ofAI chips,neuromorphic computing, anddeep learning. And now they’re turning their sights on the unholy grail of AI: the hive mind. Okay, that might be a tad dramatic. But every great science fiction horror story has to start somewhere. And Intel’s amazing advances in the area ofmultiagent evolutionary reinforcement learning(MERL) could make a great origin story forthe Borg– a sentient AI that assimilates organic species into its hive mind, fromStar Trek....

Tweets from across the USA have been used by researchers to gain an understanding of how Americans see their health. The BBCreports that two computer scientists from John Hopkins University, Baltimore developed a special search filter to identify 1.5 million health-related tweets published between May 2009 and October 2010. The duo then analysed these tweets to find that Twitter is a useful source of information about public attitudes to health....

German researchers Fraunhofer SIT have demonstrated processes that enable a would-be attacker to compromise and reveal passwords stored in a locked iPhone in under six minutes, without having to crack the phone’s passcode. The attack, brought to our attention byPC World, will be worrying to those who utilize a passcode lock to protect their iPhone devices, especially if a phone is stolen, as it can reveal passwords for corporate networks and other sensitive data....