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Category: computing – Page 206

Microsoft releases native OneNote app for Apple Vision Pro

Microsoft on Tuesday launched a native OneNote app for visionOS, showing the company’s commitment to its customers who use Apple Vision Pro. This comes after the company released Microsoft Office apps for Apple’s mixed reality headset.

A Product Manager from the company confirmed the news in a blog post. According to Microsoft, “OneNote will make use of the infinite canvas of spatial computing and can appear side-by-side with other great Microsoft apps” already available for Apple Vision Pro. For those unfamiliar, OneNote is Microsoft’s note-taking software.

Microsoft says that the visionOS version has “many of the features available on OneNote for iPad.” This includes the ability to write notes, make a digital notebook, highlight important notes, create To Do tags, lock notes with a password, synchronize with OneDrive, and share with other people.

Quantum electronics: Charge travels like light in bilayer graphene

An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has demonstrated experimentally that electrons in naturally occurring double-layer graphene move like particles without any mass, in the same way that light travels. Furthermore, they have shown that the current can be “switched” on and off, which has potential for developing tiny, energy-efficient transistors—like the light switch in your house but at a nanoscale.

Decoding the Mysteries of Life and the Cosmos: A Journey Through the Last Decade of Science

I found this on NewsBreak: Decoding the Mysteries of Life and the Cosmos: A Journey Through the Last Decade of Science.

By: Jason St Clair.

It’s worth reflecting on the scientific breakthroughs that have shaped our understanding of the universe and ourselves from 2010 to 2019. From the creation of synthetic life to the first glimpse of a black hole, these discoveries remind us of the indomitable human spirit and our unending quest for knowledge.

In 2010, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute played the role of cosmic composers, creating the first living organism with a completely synthetic genome. This milestone marked the first step in producing artificial life, a symphony of genetic notes designed in a computer, assembled in a lab, and brought to life in a donor cell. It was a testament to our growing mastery over the building blocks of life itself.

Quantinuum extends its significant lead in quantum computing, achieving historic milestones for hardware fidelity and Quantum Volume

‘Three Nines’ Surpassed: Quantinuum Notches Milestones For Hardware Fidelity And Quantum Volume Formed in 2021, Quantinuum is the combination of the quantum hardware team from Honeywell Quantum Solutions (HQS) and the quantum software team at Cambridge Quantum Computing, HQS was founded in 2014.

Quantinuum has raised the bar for the global ecosystem by achieving the historic and much-vaunted “three 9’s” 2-qubit gate fidelity in its commercial quantum computer and announcing that its Quantum Volume has surpassed one million – exponentially higher than its nearest competitors.

By Ilyas Khan, Founder and Chief Product Officer, Jenni Strabley, Sr Director of Offering Management

All quantum error correction schemes depend for their success on physical hardware achieving high enough fidelity. If there are too many errors in the physical qubit operations, the error correcting code has the effect of amplifying rather than diminishing overall error rates. For decades now, it has been hoped that one day a quantum computer would achieve “three 9’s” – an iconic, inherent 99.9% 2-qubit physical gate fidelity – at which point many of the error-correcting codes required for universal fault tolerant quantum computing would successfully be able to squeeze errors out of the system.

The Next Frontier for Brain Implants Is Artificial Vision

In 2021, he heard about a trial of a visual prosthesis at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Researchers cautioned that the device was experimental and he shouldn’t expect to regain the level of vision he had before. Still, he was intrigued enough to sign up. Thanks to the chips in his brain, Bussard now has very limited artificial vision—what he describes as “blips on a radar screen.” With the implant, he can perceive people and objects represented in white and iridescent dots.

Bussard is one of a small number of blind individuals around the world who have risked brain surgery to get a visual prosthesis. In Spain, researchers at Miguel Hernández University have implanted four people with a similar system. The trials are the culmination of decades of research.

There’s interest from industry, too. California-based Cortigent is developing the Orion, which has been implanted in six volunteers. Elon Musk’s Neuralink is also working on a brain implant for vision. In an X post in March, Musk said Neuralink’s device, called Blindsight, is “already working in monkeys.” He added: “Resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but ultimately may exceed normal human vision.”

Quantum Systems: Potential Improvements and Future Developments

“Interfacing two key devices together is a crucial step forward in allowing quantum networking, and we are really excited to be the first team to have been able to demonstrate this,” said Dr. Sarah Thomas.

How close are we to making quantum computing a reality? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as an international team of researchers discuss recent progress in how quantum information is both stored and then transmitted over long distances using a quantum memory device, which scientists have attempted to develop for some time. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the processes responsible for not only making quantum computing a reality, but also enabling it to work as seamlessly as possible.

While traditional telecommunications technology uses “repeaters” to prevent the loss of information over long distances, quantum computing cannot use such technology since it will destroy quantum information along the way. While quantum computing uses photons (particles of light) to send information, storing the information using a quantum memory device for further dissemination has eluded researchers for some time. Therefore, to combat the problem of sending quantum information over long distances, two devices are required: the first will send the quantum information while the second will store them for later dissemination.

It is the linking of these two devices that this recent study addresses, as the team of more than a dozen researchers successfully connected these two devices using optical fibers to send the data, which is being hailed as a first step in developing quantum systems. This breakthrough was accomplished with the collaboration of several European universities involving the creation of a quantum dot light source and integrating it with the quantum memory device.