Google

Larry Page in the European Parliament in 2009

Google’s co-founder and CEO Larry Page (Photo ©Marcin Mycielski) announced the launch of Calico (California Life Company ), a company that has a really ambitious purpose: challenging the problem of aging and the diseases associated with it. The ultimate goal is longevity or even immortality.

Graph showing the drop in the Internet traffic when Google's services went offline. Times are GMT (Image courtesy GoSquared Engineering. All rights reserved)

In Europe it was night and in the Americas it was still Friday afternoon when Google services went off line for a few minutes. The immediate consequence was a drop of about 40% of the Internet traffic, which means that it almost halved. The various Google services have returned to work after a few minutes causing a spike in traffic but the drop shows the great importance of Google.

Waze 3.5 screen shot underi iOS 6

Google has officially announced the acquisition of Waze, the application for social navigation. For several days there had been rumors about this deal and the doubts were due essentially to an interest by Facebook as well to buy it. The amount of money that will be paid hasn’t been declared officially: the rumors of the past few days were talking about $1.3 billion, now it seems to be around $1 billion.

128 qubit quantum processor by D-Wave Systems (Photo D-Wave Systems)

Last week Google announced the launch of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab together with NASA’s Ames Research Center and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). This laboratory will host a quantum computer created by D-Wave Systems, the D-Wave Two model that will be used for various scientific research, particularly on machine learning. The ultimate goal is to build new models for problems such as climate change.