The familiar fight between “mind as software” and “mind as biology” may be a false choice. This work proposes biological computationalism: the idea that brains compute, but not in the abstract, symbol-shuffling way we usually imagine. Instead, computation is inseparable from the brain’s physical structure, energy constraints, and continuous dynamics. That reframes consciousness as something that emerges from a special kind of computing matter, not from running the right program.
This year is the last time that we’ll ever witness the launch of any flagship 3nm chipset, because companies like Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek are expected to gravitate to TSMC’s next-generation 2nm process. The Taiwanese semiconductor giant has been reported to have begun mass production, while also investing in three additional facilities to ramp up manufacturing and meet demand.
Apple is said to have secured more than half of TSMC’s initial 2nm capacity, but the latest rumor claims that MediaTek and Qualcomm will unveil their SoCs alongside their competitor in the same month. As for how this will be possible, the tipster states that the production cycle of the 2nm node is longer than TSMC’s 3nm, and the finalization of each chipset will likely be completed earlier.
Qualcomm and MediaTek have been rumored to transition to TSMC’s improved 2nm ‘N2P’ process instead of the ‘N2’ variant to gain an edge over Apple, but according to Smart Chip Insider, all three companies will utilize the same manufacturing process while also unveiling their next-generation SoCs in September. For those unfamiliar, the A20 and A20 Pro are expected to arrive next year for the iPhone 18 series and iPhone Fold, with Qualcomm unveiling not one, but two Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 versions that will be separated by the ‘Pro’ moniker.
Every task we perform on a computer—whether number crunching, watching a video, or typing out an article—requires different components of the machine to interact with one another. “Communication is massively crucial for any computation,” says former SFI Graduate Fellow Abhishek Yadav, a Ph.D. scholar at the University of New Mexico. But scientists don’t fully grasp how much energy computational devices spend on communication.
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From the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 to the now-routine return of commercial spacecraft, heat shields—formally called thermal protection systems—are critical for protecting vehicles from the intense heat and friction of atmospheric reentry or traveling at many times the speed of sound.
Now, a team of engineers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed ways to rapidly evaluate new thermal protection materials for hypersonic vehicles. Their three-year research project combined computer modeling, laboratory experiments and flight testing to better understand how heat shields behave under extreme temperatures and pressures, and to predict their performance much faster than before.
Hypersonic flight means traveling at speeds of at least five times faster than the speed of sound, or more than 3,800 miles per hour. Other vehicles, such as ballistic missiles, can travel this fast, but hypersonic vehicles are far more maneuverable and unpredictable, making them harder to intercept. Unlike reusable spacecraft, the thermal protection systems used on U.S. hypersonic missiles—which solely deliver conventional weapons—are designed for a single use.
In late November, airlines around the world were told to urgently ground planes within their Airbus A320 fleets. Investigators had found that intense bursts of solar radiation could corrupt data inside a flight-control computer, potentially causing an aircraft to pitch unexpectedly. Pitch is the movement of the aircraft nose upward or downward.
Approximately 6,000 aircraft from the A320 family, about half of all A320s flying globally, needed immediate software changes before they could carry passengers again.
In Australia, Jetstar canceled around 90 flights and disrupted travel for more than 15,000 passengers, while engineers worked through the night to install the fix.
Our thoughts are specified by our knowledge and plans, yet our cognition can also be fast and flexible in handling new information. How does the well-controlled and yet highly nimble nature of cognition emerge from the brain’s anatomy of billions of neurons and circuits? A new study by researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT provides new evidence from tests in animals that the answer might be a theory called “Spatial Computing.”
First proposed in 2023 by Picower Professor Earl K. Miller and colleagues Mikael Lundqvist and Pawel Herman, Spatial Computing theory explains how neurons in the prefrontal cortex can be organized on the fly into a functional group capable of carrying out the information processing required by a cognitive task. Moreover, it allows for neurons to participate in multiple such groups, as years of experiments have shown that many prefrontal neurons can indeed participate in multiple tasks at once. The basic idea of the theory is that the brain recruits and organizes ad hoc “task forces” of neurons by using “alpha” and “beta” frequency brain waves (about 10–30 Hz) to apply control signals to physical patches of the prefrontal cortex. Rather than having to rewire themselves into new physical circuits every time a new task must be done, the neurons in the patch instead process information by following the patterns of excitation and inhibition imposed by the waves.
Think of the alpha and beta frequency waves as stencils that shape when and where in the prefrontal cortex groups of neurons can take in or express information from the senses, Miller said. In that way, the waves represent the rules of the task and can organize how the neurons electrically “spike” to process the information content needed for the task.