Lifeboat Foundation

LCARS is the fictional computer operating system used by Starfleet starships in several Star Trek TV shows and films. The system is currently displayed in the animated comedy Trek series Lower Decks. Now, one intrepid fan has adapted the Lower Decks version of LCARS into a “crazy fan project:” Project RITOS.

RITOS is a webpage that recreates the LCARS system. It’s a fun little site to poke around on. But, since this is just a recreation, there’s no actual functionality you can incorporate onto your computer. As the RITOS About page states, you just “point & click & watch. There are no goals nor wrong thing to do here. It’s just a mindless site.”

It may be mindless, but it’s also a faithful recreation of the LCARS system as depicted not just in Star Trek: Lower Decks but also in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Users can click around into various displays that show crew quarters, a ship map of the Cerritos (the Federation starship in Lower Decks), JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) images, and a Sick Bay screen. There are plenty of fun things to click on and little easter eggs to uncover for dedicated Trek fans.

Leading scientists in the field predict that lithium niobate chips, which are extremely thin, will surpass silicon chips in light-based technologies. These chips have a wide range of potential applications, from detecting ripe fruit from a distance on Earth to guiding navigation on the Moon.

According to the scientists, the artificial crystal of lithium niobate is the preferred platform for these technologies because of its superior performance and advancements in manufacturing techniques.

RMIT University’s Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell and University of Adelaide’s Dr. Andy Boes led this team of global experts to review lithium niobate’s capabilities and potential applications in the journal Science.

Considering a “computer” as anything that processes information by taking an input and producing an output leads to the obvious questions, what kind of objects could perform computations? And how small can a computer be? As transistors approach the limit of miniaturisation, these questions are more than mere curiosities, their answers could form the basis of a new computing paradigm.

In a new paper in EPJ Plus (“Towards Single Atom Computing via High Harmonic Generation”) by Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, researcher Gerard McCaul, and his co-authors demonstrate that even one of the more basic constituents of matter — atoms — can act as a reservoir for computing where all input-output processing is optical.

“We had the idea that the capacity for computation is a universal property that all physical systems share, but within that paradigm, there is a great profusion of frameworks for how one would go about actually trying to perform computations,” McCaul says.

Applied Materials Inc., the biggest maker of semiconductor-manufacturing equipment, gave a strong sales forecast for the current quarter, benefiting from demand for gear that makes auto and industrial chips.

A new paper has proposed an absolutely wild idea. What if aliens are creating black holes to use as quantum storage? It sounds crazy, but some scientists say it could give us a solution to the Fermi Paradox, which essentially states that if life is common in our universe, why have we not found evidence of it beyond Earth?

This paradox has caused quite a few ripples throughout the scientific community, especially within parts that believe alien life is out there, just waiting to be discovered. The new paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, but it was created by a team of German and Georgian scientists who say we may be looking in the wrong direction in our search for alien life.

Currently, we rely on radio signals to search for signs of life out in the universe. But, these researchers suggest that we should instead approach black holes as if alien civilizations created them as massive quantum computers to store data in. As such, we should be looking for technosignatures emanating from megastructures like pulsars, white dwarf stars, and black holes.

Over the past few years, material scientists and electronics engineers have been trying to fabricate new flexible inorganic materials to create stretchable and highly performing electronic devices. These devices can be based on different designs, such as rigid-island active cells with serpentine-shape/fractal interconnections, neutral mechanical planes or bunked structures.

Despite the significant advancements in the fabrication of stretchable materials, some challenges have proved difficult to overcome. For instance, materials with wavy or serpentine interconnect designs commonly have a limited area density and fabricating proposed stretchable materials is often both difficult and expensive. In addition, the stiffness of many existing stretchable materials does not match that of human skin tissue, making them uncomfortable on the skin and thus not ideal for creating wearable technologies.

Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Seoul National University (SNU), and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have recently fabricated a vacuum-deposited elastic polymer for developing stretchable electronics. This material, introduced in Nature Electronics, could be used to create stretchy field-effect transistors (FETs), which are primary components of most electronic devices on the market today.

Yeah, death is scary and freaky, but on the other hand, I have no direct idea of what it actually involves (having never been dead myself). Given that reality, my job is to live this life as completely as possible. You can engage fully in its richness, its sorrows, and its beauty, or you can miss it by worrying about when or how this aspect of being ends.

From this perspective, the transhumanist desire to “conquer” death sounds like the worst forms of religious zeal. Both science and spiritual practice are supposed to help us look directly into the truth of life, the Universe, and Everything. Death, whatever it means, is part of all three. To spend effort thinking otherwise is to, quite sadly, miss the point profoundly.

Even more important, however, is the wrong-headedness of the transhuman conception of what it means to be human. Their idea is that it’s literally all in the head. Your life, in the transhumanist conception, is reducible to the computations happening in your brain. The totality of your experience — its vibrancy and immediacy and the strange inescapable luminosity of its presence — is all just meat computing. And if that’s the case, who needs the meat? Let’s just swap out the neurons for silicon chips, and it will all be the same. Heck, it will be better, and it gets to go on forever and ever.

Here is a list of some of the most popular quantum algorithms highlighting the significant impact quantum can have on the classical world:

Shor’s Algorithm

Our entire data security systems are based on the assumption that factoring integers with a thousand or more digits is practically impossible. That was until Peter Shor in 1995 proposed that quantum mechanics allows factorisation to be performed in polynomial time, rather than exponential time achieved using classical algorithms.

Windows 11 runs best on a PC designed for Windows. When such an option is not available, here are two different ways to use Windows with Mac.