Hardware

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At the Watson Developer Conference held in San Francisco, IBM announced Project Intu, a new platform designed to make its Watson cognitive computing system accessible from any device. Launched for now in an experimental version, it gives developers who have a Bluemix account to have access to Watson Intu Gateway and create applications using Watson using the SDKs provided as free software through Watson Developer Cloud, Intu Gateway and GitHub.

Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf (Photo courtesy Qualcomm. All rights reserved)

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The multinational semiconductor producer Qualcomm Incorporated announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire NXP Semiconductors N.V., which operates in the same field, for a total of about $47 billion to be paid in cash at $110 per share. This is the largest acquisition in the history in the semiconductor field.

Map of the outages caused by the October 21, 2016 attacks (Image courtesy Downdetector.com)

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A few days after the attacks incredibly massive attacks suffered in two stages by Dyn, a provider of Internet service including the DNS management, information, estimates on affected devices and theories on the potential culprits keep on arriving. Very high profile sites such as the social networks Twitter and Reddit, famous online services such as e-Bay, Netflix and Spotify and other sites have been hit more or less hard. The involvement of many devices for the Internet of Things shows how their security is too often non-existent.

Schematic of a transistor made of carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide (Image courtesy Sujay Desai/UC Berkeley)

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An article published in the journal “Science” describes the creation of a new type of transistor with a working gate of one nanometer, a billionth of a meter, the smallest ever made. A team led by Ali Javey of the USA’s Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) used carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide as materials to create this transistor instead of silicon.

Octobot (Image courtesy Lori Sanders/Harvard University)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the creation of an Octobot, a robot with the appearance of an octopus produced using soft materials. A Harvard University team put together various disciplines combining mechanical engineering and microfluidics to create with a 3D printer and other production methods a small prototype equipped with an autonomous programming.