We all know, at least intellectually, that our computers are all built with lots of tiny transistors. But beyond that it’s a little hard to describe. They’re printed on a silicon wafer somehow ...

Examples like Intel's Loihi chips tend to ... A paper published in Nature on Wednesday describes a way to get plain-old silicon transistors to behave a lot like an actual neuron.

The idea of an optical transistor — and the associated optical logic circuits that may follow — conjures images of light controlling light in some sparkling, transparent computer. This dream ...