The team says that DNA — known for its stability and density — could be an ideal candidate for MRI data storage.
Brain MRI scans provide invaluable insights into our bodies.
Interestingly, the team successfully encoded 11.28 megabytes of brain MRI data into roughly 250,000 DNA sequences. This translates to a data density of 2.39 bits per base.
The encoded oligos, which are the DNA sequences containing the MRI data, are stored in a “dry powder form.” The oligos weigh only 3 micrograms, which is incredibly small. This suggests that a vast amount of data can be stored in a tiny space.
It can “support over 300 reads under current technical standards.”
Entanglement is the essential resource that enables quantum information and processing tasks. Historically, sources of entangled light were developed as experimental tools to test the foundations of quantum mechanics. In this study, we make an extreme version of such a source, where the entangled photons are separated in energy by 5 orders of magnitude, to engineer a quantum interconnect between light and superconducting microwave devices.
Our entanglement source is an integrated chip-scale device with a specially designed acoustic transducer, whose vibrations can simultaneously modulate the frequency of an optical cavity and generate an oscillating voltage in a superconducting electrical resonator. We operate this transducer at cryogenic temperatures to maintain the acoustic and electrical components of the device close to their quantum ground state and excite it with laser pulses to generate entangled pairs. We measure statistical correlations between the optical and microwave emission to verify entanglement.
Our work demonstrates a fundamental prerequisite for a quantum information processing architecture in which room-temperature optical communication links may be used to network superconducting quantum-bit processors in distant cryogenic setups.
A team of engineers and physicists at quantum computing company Quantinuum has conducted the first-ever teleportation of a logical qubit using fault-tolerant methods. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes the setup and teleportation methods they used and the fidelity achieved by each.
Researchers have developed a new type of bifocal lens that offers a simple way to achieve two foci (or spots) with intensities that can be adjusted by applying external voltage. The lenses, which use two layers of liquid crystal structures, could be useful for various applications such as optical interconnections, biological imaging, augmented/virtual reality devices and optical computing.
An MIT researcher has gotten the 30-year-old computer game Doom running on actual gut bacteria. The frame rate is really bad, as the game would take nearly 600 years to beat.
Although quantum computing is a nascent field, there are plenty of key moments that defined it over the last few decades as scientists strive to create machines that can solve impossible problems.
DOOM has been ported to quantum computers, marking another milestone for this seminal 3D gaming title. However, the coder behind this feat admits that there is currently no quantum computer capable of executing (playing) this code right now. All is not lost, though, as Quandoom can run on a classical computer, even a modest laptop, using a lightweight QASM simulator.
Barcelona ICFO-based Quantum Information PhD student Luke Mortimer, AKA Lumorti, is behind this newest port of DOOM. In the ReadMe file accompanying the Quandoom 1.0.0 release, Lumorti quips that “It is a well-known fact that all useful computational devices ever created are capable of running DOOM,” and humorously suggests that Quandoom may be the first practical use found for quantum computers.
A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. The way it worked was, Penrose spoke for a half hour about his ideas about conscious ness (Gödel, quantum gravity, microtubules, uncomputability, you know the drill), then I delivered a half-hour “response,” and then there was an hour of questions and discussion from the floor. Below, I’m sharing the prepared notes for my talk, as well as some very brief recollections about the discussion afterward. (Sorry, there’s no audio or video.) I unfortunately don’t have the text or transparencies for Penrose’s talk available to me, but—with one exception, which I touch on in my own talk—his talk very much followed the outlines of his famous books, The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind.
Still, I thought it might be of interest to some readers how I organized this material for the specific, unenviable task of debating the guy who proved that our universe contains spacetime singularities.
