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Pioneering work into Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) and the theory of computation reveals a new revolution. Quantum physics is essential to the understanding of deuces with two stable states and to how theoretically, classical Turing computation is physically possible. Furthermore, completely novel quantum‐mechanical computational devices utilizing dimensional confinement can be made; similar mechanisms may well exist in natural biological systems and brains. Shows that this new quantum‐mechanical perspective yields the basis for a model of conscious machinery, with correspondingly well defined processes specifying the nature of perception, cognition and information, for which as yet computer science has no agreed definitions.

Interprets and discusses the new and substantial work by the Denis Guichard Prizewinner, Jean‐Claude Perez, on the further understanding of DNA.

Texas instruments has a cheap starter kit for newcomers to AI computing. For a mere £135, five video tapes of the highlights of the company's satellite symposia on AI are provided. Also included are “hands‐on” PC‐compatible demonstration software, a 35 mm colour slide presentation on the theory and benefits of AI, a set of literature which contains two copies of “Understanding Artificial Intelligence” — Texas Instrument's book on AI — and a copy of an issue of Intelligence, its AI newsletter. The company will provide full details; write to: TI/AI Starter Kit, PO Box 50, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, UK.

The Newsletter of the Cybernetics Machine Group of the British Computer Society (30 November 1989) has given details of the group's activities. In this issue the Chairman gave an analysis of progress in the field over the past three years. A redefinition of aims and activities was proposed — a sharper focus by means of which even greater progress can be made. It concluded that the revised remit of the group can be nothing less than the discovery of the physical laws by means of which natural information processing, knowledge engineering and intelligence take place.

Contact with other researchers working in the field of surreal numbers, and in particular of their application to computation, and to physics, is sought. An outline research paper on surreal models of arithmetic is presented as an invitation to workers in cybernetics and systems to participate in the study. The extension to Turing computability provided by the surreal models of arithmetic is provably, without any loss of mathematical generality, polynomially complex so that Psurreal = NP surreal. It is shown that these models could have widespread practical application in safety‐critical systems, and that they demonstrably determine régimes for computation in a minimum number of ways.

Provides a comparison of the press coverage of the introduction of IVF in different contexts, giving a vantage point for examining the variability and the context‐dependence of the issue. Sheds some light on the cultural‐political‐social problems that the new technology entails. Contrasts the differences between Canada and Israel, showing that both countries endorse modern technology in the field of medidine: in both countries, IVF was imported about the same time and both used the US and Britain as a frame of reference and model rather than local developments. Shows the cultural differences of how each culture embraced the new technology.