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Category: computing – Page 220

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a computer answer all of the biggest questions in the universe?

In his first year of graduate school, in 2013, Michael Wagman walked into his advisor’s office and asked, “Can you help me simulate the universe?”

Wagman, a theoretical physicist and associate scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, thought it seemed like a reasonable question to ask. “We have all of these beautiful theoretical descriptions of how we think the world works, so I wanted to try and connect those formal laws of physics to my everyday experience of reality,” he says.

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As connectivity continues to expand and the number of devices on a network with it, IoT’s ambition of creating a world of connected things grows. Yet, with pros, comes the cons, and the flip side of this is the growing security challenges that come with it too.

Security has been a perennial concern for IoT since it’s utilisation beyond its use for basic functions like tallying the stock levels of a soda machine. However, for something of such interest to the industry, plans for standardisation remain allusive. Instead, piece meal plans to ensure different elements of security, like zero trust for identity and access management for devices on a network, or network segmentation for containing breaches, are undertaken by different companies according to their needs.

Yet with the advancement of technology, things like quantum computing pose a risk to classic cryptography methods which, among other things, ensures data privacy is secure when being transferred from device to device or even to the Cloud.

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Transistors are crucial electronic components that regulate, amplify and control the flow of current inside most existing devices. In recent years, electronics engineers have been trying to identify materials and design strategies that could help to further improve the performance of transistors, while also reducing their size.

Two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides have some advantageous properties that could help to enhance the capabilities of transistors. While past studies have demonstrated the potential of these materials in individual transistors, their use for developing entire integrated circuits (ICs) that operate at high frequencies has proved challenging.

Researchers at Nanjing University in China recently created new ICs that can operate at GHz frequencies, based on the 2D semiconducting material monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). Their devices, presented in a Nature Electronics paper, rely on MoS2-based field-effect transistors (FETs).

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Quantum advantage is the milestone the field of quantum computing is fervently working toward, where a quantum computer can solve problems that are beyond the reach of the most powerful non-quantum, or classical, computers.

Quantum refers to the scale of atoms and molecules where the laws of physics as we experience them break down and a different, counterintuitive set of laws apply. Quantum computers take advantage of these strange behaviors to solve problems.

There are some types of problems that are impractical for classical computers to solve, such as cracking state-of-the-art encryption algorithms. Research in recent decades has shown that quantum computers have the potential to solve some of these problems. If a quantum computer can be built that actually does solve one of these problems, it will have demonstrated quantum advantage.

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In 1960, DARPA funded three university-based Inderdisciplinary Laboratories (IDLs) that opened the way toward an enormous field of research and development known today as materials science and engineering. In this video, DARPA program managers, DARPA-funded researchers, and a Naval Research Laboratory scientist tell this field-building story as it unfolded over the past six decades, all the while delivering breakthroughs in the way materials are designed, processed, and deployed to push technologies forward. Intelligent processing of materials (IPM), accelerated insertion of materials (AIM), and integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) are among the specific programs detailed in the video. DARPA is currently developing technologies that enable the crafting of new materials with unprecedented properties by designing and controlling matter from atoms on up to human-scale systems.

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The COVID-19 pandemic supply shortfalls and geopolitical issues cast a bright light on the decline of semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, down from 37 percent of the global total in 1993 to about 12 percent now. The Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science Act of 2022 (CHIPS Act) directed $280 billion in spending, with the bulk on scientific research and development.

America needs better computer chips.

Mobile devices are ubiquitous; we carry them around in a pocket or purse and use them for everyday tasks. However, they are connected to centralized servers and thus cannot learn much about or adjust to their complicated and changing environments independently.

Three research groups have exploited the nuclear spins of ytterbium-171 to manipulate qubits before they are read out—an approach that could lead to efficient error-correction schemes for trapped-atom computing platforms.

Quantum computing on neutral-atom platforms has reached remarkable milestones in the past two decades. However, researchers have yet to overcome a key barrier to the realization of a neutral-atom-based quantum computer: the efficient correction of errors. In principle that barrier can be lowered with so-called midcircuit operations. These operations involve probing the quantum state of “ancilla” qubits without disturbing nearby “data” qubits used for computation. The ancilla qubit measurements can indicate whether the data qubits have undergone faulty operations, allowing for the data qubits to be corrected midcircuit—that is, during the execution of the computation rather than after its completion. Now three independent research groups have achieved midcircuit operation, or made progress toward this goal, with a novel choice of atom: ytterbium-171 (171 Yb) [1– 3].

A neutral-atom qubit platform consists of a two-dimensional (2D) array of atoms trapped by optical tweezers—tightly focused laser beams whose wavelengths are tuned far away from the atomic transitions. The size of the traps, limited by diffraction, is typically about 1 µm. Thanks to the large electric-dipole force from the focused laser and to a high vacuum, the atoms can stay trapped for as long as tens of seconds.

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Security researchers bypassed Windows Hello fingerprint authentication on Dell Inspiron, Lenovo ThinkPad, and Microsoft Surface Pro X laptops in attacks exploiting security flaws found in the embedded fingerprint sensors.

Blackwing Intelligence security researchers discovered vulnerabilities during research sponsored by Microsoft’s Offensive Research and Security Engineering (MORSE) to assess the security of the top three embedded fingerprint sensors used for Windows Hello fingerprint authentication.

Blackwing’s Jesse D’Aguanno and Timo Teräs targeted embedded fingerprint sensors made by ELAN, Synaptics, and Goodix on Microsoft Surface Pro X, Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and Dell Inspiron 15.

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New light activated cancer treatment.

Several antibodies and antibody fragments have been previously developed for the treatment of various diseases, including cancer3,4. These antibodies bind to cell surface receptors expressed at higher levels on cancer cells, addressing a major challenge of selective cell targeting in cancer therapy. Although full-length antibodies have shown promise for treatment of several cancers, limited success has been demonstrated in eliminating solid tumors. Due to their large size, full-length antibodies are unable to diffuse deep into solid tumors5. In addition, it has been shown that high-affinity antibodies bind to the periphery of the tumor tissues, forming a barrier and preventing their further penetration6. Some studies in patients with cancer estimate that only 0.01% of the injected antibodies accumulate per gram of solid tumor tissue7. Small antibody fragments with low molecular weight can diffuse much deeper into tissues, presenting an excellent alternative to full-length antibodies. However, small antibody fragments have a low residence time in the body and often have a higher rate of dissociation (koff) from the target compared with full-length antibodies, limiting their clinical utility8. To address these challenges, antibody fragments are often multimerized9,10 and/or conjugated to larger proteins11, which increases the size of antibody fragments, again reducing their ability to penetrate into the tumor.

One solution to overcome the limitation of low residence time would be to replace the noncovalent interactions between the antibody fragment and its antigen with a covalent bond. In a notable effort, an affibody containing a photocrosslinker in its antigen binding region was shown to covalently link to its antigen and demonstrated higher accumulation on tumor tissues12. Another pioneering study involved developing affibodies containing a latent bioreactive amino acid in their antigen binding region that forms a covalent bond with the target antigen by proximity-dependent reaction without any external impetus13. However, the former had substantially lower binding affinity compared with its wild-type (wt) counterpart and thus, requires using a high concentration for efficient initial binding, while the latter could react with target antigen expressed on healthy cells causing side effects.

Although antibody-based therapeutics are more selective than several cytotoxic small molecule drugs used for cancer treatment, they can cause cardiac toxicity and skin reactions14. These side effects are due to the binding of the antibody to its receptor antigen expressed on healthy cells. This challenge could be addressed by activating antibody–antigen binding in the tumor microenvironment. One notable example in this direction is the development of antibodies containing an inhibitory N-terminal domain that is removed by tumor-specific proteases15. However, this approach would be difficult to extend to antibody fragments whose N terminus is not involved in antigen binding. We and others have also developed light-activated antibody fragments either by site-specific installation of photocaged functional groups or by introducing light-responsive proteins into antibodies16,17,18. In principle, such antibodies could be activated at the site of tumors using surgically implanted biocompatible light-emitting diodes (LEDs)19, thereby reducing the side effects of antibody-based therapeutics.

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