For more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5-nanometer threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about one-quarter the size of high-end 20-nanometer-gate transistors now on the market. A research team led by faculty scientist Ali Javey at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has done just that by creating a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate. Boeing CEO vows to beat Musk to Mars Boeing Co. once helped the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the race to the moon. Now the company intends to go toe-to-toe with newcomers such as billionaire Elon Musk in the next era of space exploration and commerce.

Olli, a 3D printed, self-driving minibus, to hit the road in US A new maker of self-driving vehicles burst onto the scene Thursday in partnership with IBM's supercomputer platform Watson, and it's ready to roll right now. The vehicle -- a 3D-printed minibus called "Olli" capable of carrying 12 people -- was unveiled by Arizona-based startup Local Motors outside the US capital city Washington. Napster's improbable journey This week the Rhapsody music service announced that it will retire the Rhapsody name and re-brand its service (and the company) under the Napster brand. The Napster name has endured a long journey in the 17 years since Shawn Fanning first created the service in early 1999. I thought it might be helpful to put together a short history tracing that path.

Once thought safe, DDR4 memory shown to be vulnerable to "Rowhammer" Physical weaknesses in memory chips that make computers and servers susceptible to hack attacks dubbed "Rowhammer" are more exploitable than previously thought and extend to DDR4 modules, not just DDR3, according to a recently published research paper. The paper, titled How Rowhammer Could Be Used to Exploit Weaknesses in Computer Hardware... Ars Technica How HTC and Valve built the Vive Long before the Vive was born, both software developer Valve and phone manufacturer HTC were separately looking into virtual reality. In 2012, VR was beginning to creep back into the public imagination. It started in May of that year, when id Software's John Carmack demoed a modified Oculus Rift running Doom 3. The following month, he took the Rift to a wider audience at the E3 games convention. By August, Palmer Luckey launched the Oculus Kickstarter campaign, and it broke records.