Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: computing – Page 272

Dr. Joni L. Rutter, Ph.D., (https://ncats.nih.gov/director/bio) is the Director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS — https://ncats.nih.gov/) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) where she oversees the planning and execution of the Center’s complex, multifaceted programs that aim to overcome scientific and operational barriers impeding the development and delivery of new treatments and other health solutions. Under her direction, NCATS supports innovative tools and strategies to make each step in the translational process more effective and efficient, thus speeding research across a range of diseases, with a particular focus on rare diseases.

By advancing the science of translation, NCATS helps turn promising research discoveries into real-world applications that improve people’s health. The NCATS Strategic Plan can be found at — https://ncats.nih.gov/strategicplan.

In her previous role as the NCATS deputy director, Dr. Rutter collaborated with colleagues from government, academia, industry and nonprofit patient organizations to establish robust interactions with NCATS programs.

Prior to joining NCATS, Dr. Rutter served as the director of scientific programs within the All of Us Research Program, where she led the scientific programmatic development and implementation efforts to build a national research cohort of at least 1 million U.S. participants to advance precision medicine. During her time at NIH, she also has led the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). In this role, she developed and coordinated research on basic and clinical neuroscience, brain and behavioral development, genetics, epigenetics, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics, and drug discovery. Dr. Rutter also coordinated the NIDA Genetics Consortium and biospecimen repository.

Throughout her career, Dr. Rutter has earned an international reputation for her diverse and unique expertise via her journal publications and speaking engagements, and she has received several scientific achievement awards, including the 2022 Rare Disease Legislative Advocates–RareVoice Award for Federal Advocacy and the 2022 FedHealthIT–Women in Leadership Impact Award.

Dr. Rutter received her Ph.D. from the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire, and completed a fellowship at NCI within the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics.

Continue reading “Dr. Joni L. Rutter, Ph.D. — Director, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences — NIH” | >

Heata is now using these busy servers to heat water for homes.

Using heat generated by computers to provide free hot water was an idea born not in a high-tech laboratory, but in a battered country workshop deep in the woods of Godalming, England.

“The idea of using the wasted heat of computing to do something else has been hovering in the air for some time,” explains Chris Jordan, a 48-year-old physicist, “but only now does technology allow us to do it adequately.

Read more | >

The so-called superconducting (SC) diode effect is an interesting nonreciprocal phenomenon, occurring when a material is SC in one direction and resistive in the other. This effect has been the focus of numerous physics studies, as its observation and reliable control in different materials could enable the future development of new integrated circuits.

Researchers at RIKEN and other institutes in Japan and the United States recently observed the SC diode effect in a newly developed device comprised of two coherently coupled Josephson junctions. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, could guide the engineering of promising technologies based on coupled Josephson junctions.

“We experimentally studied nonlocal Josephson effect, which is a characteristic SC transport in the coherently coupled Josephson junctions (JJs), inspired by a previous theoretical paper published in NanoLetters,” Sadashige Matsuo, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org.

Read more | >

Researchers from Austria and the U.S. have designed a new type of quantum computer that uses fermionic atoms to simulate complex physical systems. The processor uses programmable neutral atom arrays and is capable of simulating fermionic models in a hardware-efficient manner using fermionic gates.

The team led by Peter Zoller demonstrated how the new quantum processor can efficiently simulate fermionic models from quantum chemistry and particle physics. The paper is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Fermionic atoms are atoms that obey the Pauli exclusion principle, which means that no two of them can occupy the same simultaneously. This makes them ideal for simulating systems where fermionic statistics play a crucial role, such as molecules, superconductors and quark-gluon plasmas.

Read more | >

Researchers have successfully forced electromagnetic (EM) waves that usually pass right through each other to collide head-on by manipulating time, made possible with the unique properties of metamaterials.

Inspired by the concept of using macro-scale waves like tsunamis or earthquakes to cancel each other out, the manipulation of time interfaces to cause these photons to collide instead of pass through each other could open up a wide range of engineering applications, including advances in telecommunications, optical computing, and even energy harvesting.

Is Using One Wave to Cancel Another Wave Possible?

Read more | >

Through a series of innovative experiments, he and his team found that a sheet of glass crystal just a few atoms thick could trap and carry light. Not only that, but it was surprisingly efficient and could travel relatively long distances—up to a centimeter, which is very far in the world of light-based computing.

The research, published Aug. 10 in Science, demonstrates what are essentially 2D photonic circuits, and could open paths to new technology.

2D optical waveguides could point way to new technology.

Read more | >

The prospect of a quantum internet, connecting quantum computers and capable of highly secure data transmission, is enticing, but making it poses a formidable challenge. Transporting quantum information requires working with individual photons rather than the light sources used in conventional fiber optic networks.

To produce and manipulate , scientists are turning to quantum light emitters, also known as . These atomic-scale defects in semiconductor materials can emit single photons of fixed wavelength or color and allow photons to interact with electron spin properties in controlled ways.

A team of researchers has recently demonstrated a more effective technique for creating quantum emitters using pulsed ion beams, deepening our understanding of how are formed. The work was led by Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers Thomas Schenkel, Liang Tan, and Boubacar Kanté who is also an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

Read more | >

The era of mainframe computers and directly programming machines with switches is long past, but plenty of us look back on that era with a certain nostalgia. Getting that close to the hardware and knowing precisely what’s going on is becoming a little bit of a lost art. That’s why [Phil] took it upon himself to build this homage to the mainframe computer of the 70s, which all but disappeared when PCs and microcontrollers took over the scene decades ago.

The machine, known as PlasMa, is not a recreation of any specific computer but instead looks to recreate the feel of computers of this era in a more manageable size. [Phil] built the entire machine from scratch, and it can be programmed directly using toggle switches to input values into registers and memory. Programs can be run or single-stepped, and breakpoints can be set for debugging. The internal workings of the machine, including the program counter, instruction register, accumulator, and work registers, are visible in binary lights. Front panel switches let you control those same items.

The computer also hosts three different microcodes, each providing a unique instruction set. Two are based on computers from Princeton, Toy-A, and Toy-B, used as teaching tools. The third is a more advanced instruction set that allows using things like emulated peripherals, including storage devices. If you want to build one or just follow along as the machine is constructed, programmed, and used, [Phil] has a series of videos demonstrating its functionality, and he’s made everything open-source for those more curious. It’s a great way to get a grasp on the fundamentals of computing, and the only way we could think of to get even more into the inner workings of a machine like this is to build something like a relay computer.

Read more | >

Summary: New research delves into how the statistical distributions of neuron densities shape mammalian brains.

The study analyzed seven species, discovering that neuron densities follow a lognormal distribution – a fundamental organizational principle. This distribution is distinct due to its asymmetric curve and is significant for understanding brain connectivity and the design of brain-inspired technology.

As many attributes of the brain align with this distribution, it hints at its potential computational benefits.

Read more | >