The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

Decimal notation describes numbers using the digits 1 through 10. Binary notation describes them using just two digits, 1 and 0, where each bit in a string represents a power of 2. The right-most bit ...

Consider a simple black-and-white image. If 0 is black (or on) and 1 is white (or off), then a simple black-and-white picture can be created using binary. In a low-resolution image, the pixels are ...

A new DNA computer calculates square roots of perfect squares up to 900. Like quantum computers, DNA computers are an exciting frontier of post-silicon computing. Where previous examples were up to 4 ...

Memo to the developers of superfast quantum computers: give up on the familiar 1s-and-0s binary system used in conventional computers. By switching to a novel five-state system, you will find it ...