Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2021

Suppose you are trying to transmit a message. Convert each character into bits, and each bit into a signal. Then send it, over copper or fiber or air. Try as you might to be as careful as possible, what is received on the other side will not be the same as what you began with. Noise never fails to corrupt.

In the 1940s, computer scientists first confronted the unavoidable problem of noise. Five decades later, they came up with an elegant approach to sidestepping it: What if you could encode a message so that it would be obvious if it had been garbled before your recipient even read it? A book can’t be judged by its cover, but this message could.

Continue reading “Researchers Defeat Randomness to Create Ideal Code” »

University of Chicago physicists have invented a “quantum flute” that, like the Pied Piper, can coerce particles of light to move together in a way that’s never been seen before.

Described in two studies published in Physical Review Letters and Nature Physics, the breakthrough could point the way towards realizing quantum memories or new forms of error correction in quantum computers, and observing quantum phenomena that cannot be seen in nature.

Assoc. Prof. David Schuster’s lab works on quantum bits —the quantum equivalent of a computer bit—which tap the strange properties of particles at the atomic and sub-atomic level to do things that are otherwise impossible. In this experiment, they were working with particles of light, known as photons, in the microwave spectrum.

NVIDIA’s next-gen Lovelace graphics cards are rumored to feature considerably higher TGPs than their predecessors. We’re looking at power draws of up to 600W for the RTX 4090 and even more for the RTX 4,090 Ti. This is despite the fact that these chips will be fabbed on TSMC’s 4nm N4 process which is easily one of the most efficient nodes on the planet. The excessive power consumption won’t be for nothing though, and the RTX 4,090 (based on the AD102 die) will pack around 16K FP32 cores.

The AD102 die will get a haircut before going into the RTX 4,090, dropping the core count from 18,432 to 16,384. This means that a few of the SMs, TPCs, and GPCs along with the L2 cache will also be axed. As for the clocks, Kopite7kimi states that we can expect core boost clocks well over 2.8GHz.

We might get a GPU with 16,384 pulsating cores running at a whopping 3GHz and custom liquid-cooled models clocked even higher. The more accessible RTX 4,080 featuring the AD103 die should pack around 10,000 cores and boosts exceeding 3GHz. The peak power draw should stay in the 400-450W range.

A chip-sized biocomputer uses molecules moving through a network of channels to solve problems. It uses much less energy per calculation than a traditional computer.

Researchers at the Professorship of Electrical Energy Conversion Systems and Drives at Chemnitz University of Technology have succeeded for the first time in 3D printing housings for power electronic components that are used, for example, to control electrical machines. During the printing process, silicon carbide chips are positioned at a designated point on the housing.

As with the printed motor made of iron, copper and ceramics, which the professorship first presented at the Hannover Messe in 2018, ceramic and metallic pastes are also used in the 3D printing of housings. “These are sintered after the printing process, together—and this is what makes them special—with the imprinted chip,” says Prof. Dr. Ralf Werner, head of the Professorship of Electrical Energy Conversion Systems and Drives. Ceramic is used as an insulating material and copper is used for contacting the gate, drain and source areas of the field-effect transistors. “Contacting the gate area, which normally has an edge length of less than one millimeter, was particularly challenging,” adds Prof. Dr. Thomas Basler, head of the Professorship of Power Electronics, whose team supported the project with initial functional tests on prototypes.

Following the ceramic-insulated coils printed at Chemnitz University of Technology, which were presented at the Hannover Messe in 2017, and the printed motor, drive components that can withstand temperatures above 300 °C are now also available. “The desire for more temperature-resistant power electronics was obvious, because the housings for power electronic components are traditionally installed as close as possible to the engine and should therefore have an equally high temperature resistance,” says Prof. Werner.

But Cabello and others are interested in investigating a lesser-known but equally magical aspect of quantum mechanics: contextuality. Contextuality says that properties of particles, such as their position or polarization, exist only within the context of a measurement. Instead of thinking of particles’ properties as having fixed values, consider them more like words in language, whose meanings can change depending on the context: “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like bananas.”

Although contextuality has lived in nonlocality’s shadow for over 50 years, quantum physicists now consider it more of a hallmark feature of quantum systems than nonlocality is. A single particle, for instance, is a quantum system “in which you cannot even think about nonlocality,” since the particle is only in one location, said Bárbara Amaral, a physicist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. “So [contextuality] is more general in some sense, and I think this is important to really understand the power of quantum systems and to go deeper into why quantum theory is the way it is.”

Researchers have also found tantalizing links between contextuality and problems that quantum computers can efficiently solve that ordinary computers cannot; investigating these links could help guide researchers in developing new quantum computing approaches and algorithms.

In many cases, security vulnerabilities appear that affect the programs that we use on a day-to-day basis. A clear example is the browser. It may have vulnerabilities and that can allow a hacker to break in and steal passwords or personal information. That is what is happening now with Google Chrome and you should update it as soon as possible to fix a zero-day bug.

Google has released security updates to address a Zero-Day in its Chrome web browser that it said is being exploited in the wild.

Continue reading “Zero-Day vulnerability in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi browsers allow taking control of your laptop or mobile” »

The US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has selected the first-ever group of encryption tools that could potentially withstand the attack of a quantum computer.

The four selected encryption algorithms will now reportedly become part of NIST’s post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) standard, which should be finalized in about two years.

More specifically, for general encryption (used for access to secure websites), NIST has selected the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm.

Researchers, led by experts at Imperial College London, have developed a new method that allows gene expression to be precisely altered by supplying and removing electrons. Scientists engineer new tools to electronically control gene expression.

New microelectronics device can program and reprogram computer hardware on demand through electrical pulses.