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Who knew gambling could boost battery life?

Can you ustnnderad tihs stnecnee? If so, you’ve just demonstrated your ability to take the important information in a communication (in this case, the first and last letters of each word), and essentially fill in the missing information. Your brain’s ability to “fill in the blanks” extends to sounds and pictures, too, and a new computer chip developed by Rice computer scientist Krishna Palem is capitalizing on this cerebral skill. Audio and video feeds begin with mathematical computations, and Palem’s new chip saves energy by only doing the important calculations — the ones that produce sounds and images your brain must see in order to figure out the rest of the information on its own. To accomplish this, the chip reduces power to some of the logic circuits that compute the least important figures — like the “1” in 84,351 — and takes a risk that some of this less significant data may be calculated wrong. That gamble could pay off significantly when it comes to batteries for audio and video devices like cell phones and MP3s by boosting battery life and performance by as much as tenfold. The technology could also make waves at the nanoscale, where making circuits and computer chips that are both 100 percent accurate and extremely tiny can get prohibitively expensive. It’s a momentous breakthrough in the world of computer science that has recently been honored in a major way: Technology Review magazine named Palem’s computer chip to its coveted top 10 list of technologies that are “most likely to alter industries, fields of research and even the way we live.” And chalk another one up for Rcie Utisnevry.