Manu Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, and his students have developed a synchronous computer that operates using the unique physics of moving water droplets. Their goal is to design a new class of computers that can precisely control and manipulate physical matter. For more info: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/ju…
Music: “Union Hall Melody” by Blue Dot Sessions.
Scientists have translated nanoscale experimental and computational data into precise 3D representations of bacteria, yeast and human epithelial, breast and breast cancer cells in Minecraft, a video game that allows players to explore, build and manipulate structures in three dimensions.
The innovation will allow researchers and students of all ages to navigate biological cells, puncturing through the membranes of organelles to view their interiors or wandering across the cytoplasm to see how the various structures are distributed within the cell.
“CraftCells: A Window into Biological Cells” is the first broadly accessible tool allowing users to get an accurate picture of whole cells in 3D, said Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten, a professor of chemistry and of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the work with Illinois bioengineering professors Stephen Boppart and Rohit Bhargava, graduate student Kevin Tan, postdoctoral researchers Zane Thornburg and Seth Kenkel, and study lead author Tianyu Wu, a biophysics graduate student at the U. of I.
A new study published in Scientific Reports simulates particle creation in an expanding universe using IBM quantum computers, demonstrating the digital quantum simulation of quantum field theory for curved spacetime (QFTCS).
While attempts to create a complete quantum theory of gravity have been unsuccessful, there is another approach to exploring and explaining cosmological events.
QFTCS maintains spacetime as a classical background described by general relativity, while treating the matter and force fields within it quantum mechanically. This allows physicists to study quantum effects in “curved spacetime” without needing a complete theory of quantum gravity.
Two hundred million years ago, our mammal ancestors developed a new brain feature: the neocortex. This stamp-sized piece of tissue (wrapped around a brain the size of a walnut) is the key to what humanity has become. Now, futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests, we should get ready for the next big leap in brain power, as we tap into the computing power in the cloud.
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Imagine a world where the act of observation itself holds the key to solving our most complex problems, a world where the very fabric of reality becomes a canvas for computation. This is the tantalizing promise of Observational Computation (OC), a radical new paradigm poised to redefine the very nature of computation and our understanding of the universe itself.
Forget silicon chips and algorithms etched in code; OC harnesses the enigmatic dance of quantum mechanics and the observer effect, where the observer and the observed are inextricably intertwined. Instead of relying on traditional processing power, OC seeks to translate computational problems into carefully crafted observer-environment systems. Picture a quantum stage where potential solutions exist in a hazy superposition, like ghostly apparitions waiting for the spotlight of observation to solidify them into reality.
By meticulously designing these “observational experiments,” we can manipulate quantum systems, nudging them towards desired outcomes. This elegant approach offers tantalizing advantages over our current computational methods. Imagine harnessing the inherent parallelism of quantum superposition for exponentially faster processing, or tapping into the natural energy flows of the universe for unprecedented energy efficiency.
Researchers from Nagoya University in Japan and the Slovak Academy of Sciences have unveiled new insights into the interplay between quantum theory and thermodynamics. The team demonstrated that while quantum theory does not inherently forbid violations of the second law of thermodynamics, quantum processes may be implemented without actually breaching the law.
This discovery, published in npj Quantum Information, highlights a harmonious coexistence between the two fields, despite their logical independence. Their findings open up new avenues for understanding the thermodynamic boundaries of quantum technologies, such as quantum computing and nanoscale engines.
This breakthrough contributes to the long-standing exploration of the second law of thermodynamics, a principle often regarded as one of the most profound and enigmatic in physics.
Researchers at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, led by Wolf Singer, have made a new discovery in understanding fundamental brain processes. For the first time, the team has provided compelling evidence that the brain’s characteristic rhythmic patterns play a crucial role in information processing. While these oscillatory dynamics have long been observed in the brain, their purpose has remained mostly elusive until now.
The study has the potential to transform our understanding of brain activity. Using computer simulations, the researchers show that recurrent networks with oscillating nodes demonstrate better performance compared to non-oscillating networks and replicate many experimentally observed phenomena.
These findings indicate that oscillatory dynamics are not just an epiphenomenon but are essential for efficient computation in the brain. The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Multiferroic materials, in which electric and magnetic properties are combined in promising ways, will be the heart of new solutions for data storage, data transmission, and quantum computers. Meanwhile, understanding the origin of such properties at a fundamental level is key for developing applications, and neutrons are the ideal probe.
Neutrons possess a magnetic dipole moment which makes them sensitive to magnetic fields generated by unpaired electrons in materials. This makes neutron scattering techniques a powerful tool to probe the magnetic behavior of materials at atomic level.
The story of the so-called layered perovskites and the breakthrough results now published are a paradigmatic example highlighting both the role of fundamental studies in the development of applications and of the power of neutrons. Being a promising class of materials exhibiting coupled magnetic and electric ordering properties at ambient temperatures, the magnetic structure of the layered perovskites YBaCuFeO5—and thus the origin of their interesting magneto-electric behavior—was still to be unambiguously determined.
AMD has released mitigation and firmware updates to address a high-severity vulnerability that can be exploited to load malicious CPU microcode on unpatched devices.
The security flaw (CVE-2024–56161) is caused by an improper signature verification weakness in AMD’s CPU ROM microcode patch loader.
Attackers with local administrator privileges can exploit this weakness, resulting in the loss of confidentiality and integrity of a confidential guest running under AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP).
Computational genes.
Single-cell decisions made in complex environments underlie many bacterial phenomena. Image-based transcriptomics approaches offer an avenue to study such behaviors, yet these approaches have been hindered by the massive density of bacterial messenger RNA. To overcome this challenge, we combined 1000-fold volumetric expansion with multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH) to create bacterial-MERFISH. This method enables high-throughput, spatially resolved profiling of thousands of operons within individual bacteria. Using bacterial-MERFISH, we dissected the response of Escherichia coli to carbon starvation, systematically mapped subcellular RNA organization, and charted the adaptation of a gut commensal Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron to micrometer-scale niches in the mammalian colon.
