Lifeboat Foundation

A former executive of Samsung Electronics stole the juggernaut’s confidential semiconductor data to build a copycat chip facility in China, South Korean prosecutors alleged on Monday.

The 65-year-old defendant, who also previously worked for Korean chipmaker SK Hynix, has been arrested. He has been accused of violating industrial technology protection laws and stealing trade secrets from 2018 to 2019 to establish a copy of Samsung’s semiconductor plant, just 1.5 kilometers away from Samsung chip factory in Xi’an, China.

The ex-Samsung exec’s attempt to build the copycat chip plant allegedly fell through after his backer, purportedly an undisclosed Taiwanese company, canceled more than a $6 billion (approximately 8 trillion won) investment into the project, prosecutors said. Instead, he received capital from investors in China and Taiwan to produce trial chip products based on Samsung’s technology.

A team led by Prof. Guo Guangcan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) provides a comprehensive overview of the progress achieved in the field of quantum teleportation. The team, which includes Prof. Hu Xiaomin, Prof. Guo Yu, Prof. Liu Biheng, and Prof. Li Chuanfeng from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), CAS, was invited to publish a review paper on quantum teleportation in Nature Review Physics.

As one of the most important protocols in the field of quantum information, quantum teleportation has attracted great attention since it was proposed in 1993. Through entanglement distribution and Bell-state measurement, quantum teleportation enables the nonlocal transmission of an unknown quantum state, which has deepened the understanding of quantum entanglement. More importantly, quantum teleportation can effectively overcome the distance limitation of direct transmission of quantum states in quantum communication, as well as realize long-range interactions between different quantum bits in quantum computing.

The team has been at the forefront of experimental studies on high-dimensional quantum teleportation and quantum networks. Their notable achievements include the successful preparation of the world’s highest fidelity 32-dimensional quantum entanglement, the effective transmission of high-dimensional entanglement over 11 kilometers of optical fiber, and the development of efficient techniques for quantum entanglement detection. They have also made significant progress in areas such as high-dimensional quantum dense coding, high-dimensional quantum guidance, and high-dimensional quantum teleportation.

It has 19 cores which can each carry a signal and can be adopted without any infrastructure changes.

An international collaboration of researchers has achieved a new speed record after transferring 1.7 petabits of data over 41 miles (67 km) of standard optical fiber cable. That’s the equivalent speed of 17 million broadband internet connections.

Optical fiber cables are a critical component of the modern world of the internet, where they connect data centers, satellite ground stations, mobile phone towers as well as continents to one another.

Here’s my new article for Aporia Magazine. A lot of wild ideas in it. Give it a read:

Regardless of the ethics and whether the science can even one day be worked out for Quantum Archaeology, the philosophical dilemma it presents to Pascal’s Wager is glaring. If humans really could eradicate the essence of death as we know it—including even the ability to ever permanently die—Pascal’s Wager becomes unworkable. Frankly, so does my Transhumanist Wager. After all, why should I dedicate my life and energy to living indefinitely through science when, by the next century, technology could bring me back exactly as I was—or even as an improved version of myself?

Continue reading “How to bring back the dead” »

Quantum Brilliance, the company behind miniaturized, room-temperature quantum computing products, has announced the general availability of Qristal SDK.

Previously available in beta, Qristal SDK is an open-source software development kit designed for researching applications integrated with its diamond-based quantum accelerators.

Daniel Lidar, the Viterbi Professor of Engineering at USC and Director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology, and first author Dr. Bibek Pokharel, a Research Scientist at IBM Quantum, achieved this quantum speedup advantage in the context of a “bitstring guessing game.”

By effectively mitigating the errors often encountered at this level, they have successfully managed bitstrings of up to 26 bits long, significantly larger than previously possible. (For context, a bit refers to a binary number that can either be a zero or a one).

Quantum computers promise to solve certain problems with an advantage that increases as the problems increase in complexity. However, they are also highly prone to errors, or noise. The challenge, says Lidar, is “to obtain an advantage in the real world where today’s quantum computers are still ‘noisy.’”.

The experiments are the first of their kind and could lead to new advances in computing.

A team at the University of Chicago.

Founded in 1,890, the University of Chicago (UChicago, U of C, or Chicago) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Located on a 217-acre campus in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, near Lake Michigan, the school holds top-ten positions in various national and international rankings. UChicago is also well known for its professional schools: Pritzker School of Medicine, Booth School of Business, Law School, School of Social Service Administration, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Divinity School and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

NASA and a team of partners has demonstrated a space-to-ground laser communication system operating at a record breaking 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) data rate. The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) satellite payload was designed and built by[MIT Lincoln Laboratory]. The record of the highest data rate ever achieved by a space-to-Earth optical communication link surpasses the 100 Gbps record set by the same team in June 2022.

[NASA] and a team of partners has demonstrated a space-to-ground laser communication system operating at a record breaking 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) data rate. The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) satellite payload was designed and built by [MIT Lincoln Laboratory]. The record of the highest data rate ever achieved by a space-to-Earth optical communication link surpasses the 100 Gbps record set by the same team in June 2022.

Continue reading “NASA Team Sets New Space-to-Ground Laser Communication Record” »

When interacting with another person, you likely spend part of your time trying to anticipate how they will feel about what you’re saying or doing. This task requires a cognitive skill called theory of mind, which helps us to infer other people’s beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions.

MIT neuroscientists have now designed a computational model that can predict other people’s emotions—including joy, gratitude, confusion, regret, and embarrassment—approximating human observers’ social intelligence. The model was designed to predict the emotions of people involved in a situation based on the prisoner’s dilemma, a classic game theory scenario in which two people must decide whether to cooperate with their partner or betray them.

To build the model, the researchers incorporated several factors that have been hypothesized to influence people’s emotional reactions, including that person’s desires, their expectations in a particular situation, and whether anyone was watching their actions.