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(credit: IBM)

IBM Research in Zurich has created the world's first artificial nanoscale stochastic phase-change neurons. IBM has already created a population of 500 of these artificial neurons and used them to process a signal in a brain-like (neuromorphic) way.

This breakthrough is particularly notable because the phase-change neurons are fashioned out of well-understood materials that can scale down to a few nanometres, and because they are capable of firing at high speed but with low energy requirements. They are also stochastic—i.e. they always produce slightly different, random results, like biological neurons—which is very important as well.

Enough fluff—let's talk about how these phase-change neurons are actually constructed. At this point, it might help if you look at the first diagram in the gallery.

(credit: Photograph by Randy Stewart)

A notorious black hat says he has more than 200 million hacked Yahoo accounts for sale on the dark Web. The company says it is "aware of [the] claim," but is refusing to comment on its veracity. Yahoo accounts are primarily used to log into the company's webmail service, but also for other sites like Flickr.

It's unclear at this point whether Yahoo has itself been breached, but the account data has been publicly available on a Tor-accessible marketplace called The Real Deal since Monday, and is apparently being sold by a hacker known as Peace, who has previously been linked to large-scale sales of MySpace and LinkedIn account details in 2012.

A Yahoo spokesperson said:

The Outer Space Treaty requires countries to “authorize and continuously supervise" the activities of space missions under their jurisdiction, including those of commercial companies. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration carries out those duties with regard to private spaceflight, and things have worked well enough.

But now a number of companies, including SpaceX with its Red Dragon mission, are seeking to push beyond Earth orbit, which has been the traditional boundary for commercial activity. Perhaps the biggest of the many questions this raises is how permissive the federal government would be regarding this new commercial interest.

The early answer seems encouraging. The first company to apply for a commercial space mission beyond Earth orbit has just received approval from the federal government. As part of the Google Lunar X Prize competition, Moon Express intends to launch a small, single-stage spacecraft to land on the Moon by the end of 2017.