9 Things Computer Can Do Now That They Couldn't Do a Year Ago

Here's our nine best new advances in hardware, software, and robotics in 2014:

1) Play "Emotionally Engaging" Music: Actual robots play emotionally engaging music with musical superpowers
2) Use "Right-Brained" chips: Neuromorphic chips integrate data storage and processing and can operate in parallel, mimicking the way the human brain processes sensory information like images and sound in a massively parallel manner. Such chips could recognize patterns in large amounts of data more efficiently than current linear or "left-brained" architectures.
3) Beat The Turing Test: A chatbot program called Eugene Goostman persuaded 33 percent of human interrogators that it was actually a 13-year-old boy, making it the first piece of software to pass the Turing test on artificial intelligence.
4) Perform Accurate Quantum Calculations: Two new types of quantum bit, or "qubit", which can be in "superpositions", i.e., in both 0 or 1 at the same time
5) Break The Broadband Barrier: The average global Internet connection speed had smashed the 4 megabit-per-second broadband threshold for the first time, hitting 4.6 Mbps during the second quarter of 2014
6) Read Your Emotions: Used keystroke dynamics and text-pattern analysis to detect the emotions of users
7) Create a Realistic Virtual Universe: Simulated 13 billion years of cosmic evolution for the first time.
8) Give A Robot Hand "Feeling": A man can now feel different types of pressure on three fingers of his prosthetic, robotic hand using a device which interacts with the nerves in his arm.
9) Start Up Instantly: A non-volatile magnetoelectric memory technology that uses a low voltage rather than current, hugely reducing power consumption. The researchers claim that this new form of memory could make low-power, instant-on computing a ubiquitous reality.