The age of what scientists call totally secure communications may have just started. It has been reported China has launched the world’s longest super secure quantum communications line. So far it is only 712 kilometers in length, but it is said it will soon be extended to 2000 kilometers. It was tested by transmitting a secure video between Hefei and Shanghai. The Chinese want to ultimately connect Shanghai to Beijing running other lines to different cities. The system uses something called quantum entanglement which we barely understand and is based on the fact one particle can be changed in one place and it immediately changes another particle anywhere else in the universe. One of the problems with this system however is the information has to be converted back to usable form at different distances and this is a weak point in the encryption system. It may turn out this system will be weaker than one would have using the strongest encryption on standard lines until it is figured out how to do away with these weak points.

Something very unusual has been built, it is a supercomputer for businesses or anybody else that wants to buy it. It has been called a private in-house supercomputer. It’s made by Nvidia and called the DGX SaturnV and even cracked the list of top 500 supercomputers in the world. Besides all of that it has become the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer. When people think of supercomputers I don’t think many of them think of Nvidia. The machine has 2,698 CPU cores. It also has 63,488 GB of RAM. When I said it was efficient I wasn’t kidding, it is 42% more efficient than the most efficient supercomputer there is. One of the things the computer is going to be used for is the more efficient design of graphic chips.

There is a war of sorts going on in some of the clean energy factions. We all know about solar cells and panels which go on the roofs of buildings and other places, but how many of us know there are also windows that generate electricity? These are called smart windows. The windows don’t only harness solar power for electricity, they can adjust to allow or block light. There is a switch that allows them to do this. As with everything else the Windows do have a downside and that is if you want them to absorb energy to be used later they have to be set to opaque. When they are not absorbing energy you can set them to clear. Here is a question, how many people want to sit in an office with windows you can’t see out of? It is only my gut feeling, but I think this will be a big failing and stop many from installing these windows. Adding to this war is Elon Musk who announced a new type of roofing tile which will act as a solar panel. He then went on to say it will probably cost less to install these tiles then to install solar panels. If this is true and if the new roof tiles are as efficient as a solar panel I would have to say for homeowners this would be the way to go.

Remember the movie Minority Report? In that movie which was based on future policing, police using a computer would use hand motions and graphics would appear in thin air. These graphics would be able to be completely manipulated with these hand motions and by speech. A new study was released which claims it will only be about five more years before we will be doing the same thing. Today the big thing is point-and-click and even when we use our fingers on a tablet it is just a version of the same thing. Scientists are saying we can credit 3D gaming where these types of gestures take place in the virtual world. The question is will people readily accept this shift in technology? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

There is another field which is changing a lot of things in the world of computing and that is organic electronics. The reason this field is changing things so much is the fact it is allowing us to place electronics in places we never thought about. It allows the printing of circuits as fast as printing a document. When you hear the word OLED or organic LEDs scientists are talking about semiconductors which are placed between layers of materials. An OLED can be printed on plastic sheets and these are lights which make this a rather remarkable discovery, since they are free of power sources like light bulbs. This also allows the sheets to be bendable and makes it possible for some devices to be extremely thin. This technology can also be used to print solar cells. All this is making it possible for people to wear ultrathin displays on their skin, which could be extremely useful in the medical field and other areas.

There is a new material on the horizon known as magnetoelectric multiferroic material. Why should you care about this? Perhaps a good reason might be the fact it is being claimed this material, if used in computers, will make them over a thousand times faster. A technique equivalent to spray painting is used to spray thin layers of different materials over each other to achieve this new material. One scientist said before this was attempted there was only one other room temperature multi-ferric with magnetic properties which could be controlled by electricity and this was the important part of the whole project, it was electrical control which excites electronics makers so this has been a huge step forward.

Google has its own artificial intelligence and now this intelligence has developed something on its own which is an exciting form of encryption. It was instructed to create it by creating three artificial intelligences named Alice, Bob and Eve. These intelligences were instructed to created encryption which they could pass to each other and still understand. The encryption is so complex researchers don’t know what method of encryption Alice used or how Bob figured out how to decode it. I don’t know how anyone else feels about this, but it is a little creepy to think about.

I don’t think any of us expected it, but it happened. Microsoft partnered with OpenAI a nonprofit artificial intelligence company which was founded by Elon Musk. The whole idea of OpenAI is to develop artificial intelligence that will benefit humanity. Microsoft also has open-source deep learning software.