Telco infrastructure provider Nokia launched a new service aimed at helping operators use artificial intelligence and automation to better manage their 5G networks and avoid network and service-level failures.

"Traditional network and service management approaches are no longer sustainable," Nokia said in a press release announcing its AVA 5G Cognitive Operations. The new framework, pitched at communications service providers (formerly called mobile network operators), relies on virtualization and network slicing to improve wireless network performance.

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Computing devices should sweat when they get too hot, say scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, where they have developed a materials application they claim will cool down devices more efficiently and in smaller form-factors than existing fans.

It’s “a coating for electronics that releases water vapor to dissipate heat from running devices,” the team explain in a news release. “Mammals sweat to regulate body temperature,” so should electronics, they believe.

The group’s focus has been on studying porous materials that can absorb moisture from the environment and then release water vapor when warmed. MIL-101(Cr) checks the boxes, they say. The material is a metal organic framework, or MOF, which is a sorbent, a material that stores large amounts of water. The higher the water capacity one has, the greater the dissipation of heat when it's warmed.

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Silicon microchip maker Arm is working on a new semiconductor design that it says will enable machine learning, at scale, on small sensor devices. Arm has completed testing of the technology and expects to bring it to market next year.

Artificial intelligence, implemented locally on "billions and ultimately trillions" of devices is coming, the company says in a press release. Arm Holdings, owned by Japanese conglomerate Softbank, says its partners have shipped more than 160 billion Arm-based chips to date, and that 45 million of its microprocessor designs are being placed within electronics every day.

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Scientists have long envisioned brain-sensing technology that can translate thoughts into digital commands, eliminating the need for computer-input devices like a keyboard and mouse. One company is preparing to ship its latest contribution to the effort: a $399 development package for a noninvasive, AI-based, brain-computer interface.

The kit will let "users control anything in their digital world by using just their thoughts," NextMind, a commercial spinoff of a cognitive neuroscience lab claims in a press release.

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Biologically created computing devices could one day be as commonplace as today’s microprocessors and microchips, some scientists believe. Consider DNA, the carrier of genetic information and the principal component of chromosomes; it's showing promise as a data storage medium.

A recent study (PDF) suggests taking matters further and using microbes to network and communicate at nanoscale. The potential is highly attractive for the Internet of Things (IoT), where concealability and unobtrusiveness may be needed for the technology to become completely ubiquitous.

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One of Britain’s principal mobile networks, O2, has just announced that it intends to deploy Open Radio Access Network technology (O-RAN) in places.

O-RAN is a wireless industry initiative for designing and building radio network solutions using “a general-purpose, vendor-neutral hardware and software-defined technology,” explains Telecom Infra Project, the body responsible, on its website.

TIP is the trade body that, along with Intel and Vodafone, conceived of the technology alternative – an attempt at toppling the dominance of Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia, which provide almost all mobile telco infrastructure now.

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With the conceivable exhaustion of Moore’s Law – that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years – the search is on for new paths that lead to reliable incremental processing gains over time.

One possibility is that machines inspired by how the brain works could take over, fundamentally shifting computing to a revolutionary new tier, according to an explainer study released this month by Applied Physics Reviews.

“Today’s state-of-the-art computers process roughly as many instructions per second as an insect brain,” say the paper’s authors Jack Kendall, of Rain Neuromorphics, and Suhas Kumar, of Hewlett Packard Labs. The two write that processor architecture must now be completely re-thought if Moore’s law is to be perpetuated, and that replicating the “natural processing system of a [human] brain” is the way forward.

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