Lifeboat Foundation

Three resonators operating at different frequencies read a 3×3 matrix of quantum dots. © 2022 EPFL

Biochemistry and cryptography.

Google is bringing Fast Pair to Windows and TVs and more. It’s also planning Wear OS watch unlocks for phones.

Google laid out its plans for a number of new features coming to its ecosystem of devices and operating systems this year, a lot of which is focused on connecting them all or making setup easier. Whether you have an Android phone and an Android TV or a Chrome OS devices and a Wear OS watch, there is a good chance they will start to talk to each other.

Quicker setup of all devices

Continue reading “Google’s 2022 Plans are to Connect It All, Including Android…” »

IBM has created the world’s largest superconducting quantum computer as of 2021.

The tech company developed a 127-qubit quantum computer. This is over double the size of comparable machines made by Google in 2019 and the University of Science and Technology of China in 2020.

IBM claims it has created the world’s largest superconducting quantum computer, surpassing the size of state-of-the-art machines from Google and from researchers at a Chinese university. Previous devices have demonstrated up to 60 superconducting qubits, or quantum bits, working together to solve problems, but IBM’s new Eagle processor more than doubles that by stringing together 127.

CES wouldn’t be the Consumer Electronics Show without Razer bringing at least one prototype product to the event. This year was no different with the company using the annual trade show to unveil Project Sophia, a concept modular gaming desk. In its current iteration, the table includes room for 13 separate modules. These can be used to add components like touchscreen hotkey panels, external capture cards and audio mixers to Project Sophia, thereby allowing you to modify the station to your needs. Razer claims it’s possible to reconfigure the table “in seconds.”

The computer that powers everything is housed in a chassis that magnetically snaps underneath Project Sofia’s glass tabletop surface. Razer says it features the latest components from Intel and NVIDIA, and you can detach the case at any point to install new upgrades. Naturally, this being a Razer product, you’ll find plenty of RGB lighting, all of which you can control through the company’s Chroma software. But arguably the most eye-catching aspect of Project Sophia is the 65-inch OLED display Razer has built into the station. The company says it will also offer a model with a 77-inch display – but we’ll note here Project Sophia may never make it to market.

Looking at the rest of the concept, Razer appears to have paid less attention to ergonomics. Judging from the renders the company shared, you can’t adjust the height of Project Sophia to make it a standing desk or to better accommodate the position of a chair. And speaking of chairs, the company also unveiled a “Pro HyperSense” version of its $399 Enki gaming chair. Razer partnered with D-Box to add haptics to the chair. It will support 2,200 games, movies and TV series, including releases from publishers like Ubisoft and Microsoft. Oh, and it too will come with RGB lighting.

The first PCs to incorporate Microsoft’s Pluton security chip will be available from Lenovo this May.

The new SSDs have read/write speeds up to 14/12GBps.

For the first time in two years, XPG is on location in Las Vegas for the 2022 CES show, revealing ‘Dawn of a New Xtreme’. Under the new theme, the latest products from XPG and ADATA including gaming systems, peripherals, accessories, and components were unveiled. The highlight, however, is the PCIe (peripheral component interconnect express) 5.0 solid-state drives (SSD), the super-fast solid storage that is capable of read/write speeds up to 14/12GBps.

Twice as fast as the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives, Adata introduced two prototypes of its first PCIe 5.0 NVMe M.2 SSDs with capacities up to 8TB. The so-called Project Nighthawk SSD is designed using a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller capable of sequential read/write speeds up to 14/12GBps, while the Project Blackbird SSD features an InnoGrit IG5666 controller for 14/10GBps read/write speeds.

If you had a few hundred experiments to manage during your days in space, how would you blow off steam in your spare time?

A badminton match was the activity of choice for International Space Station astronauts and spaceflight participants during the holidays. You can catch a short video of the activities of several crew members of Expedition 66 below; make sure to rotate it so you can watch the crew members working in 360 degrees.

The module they are using is the Japanese Kibo module, which is a common location for crews to conduct press conferences. The Kibo module also has a little more space for physical activities than some of the other ones, especially since there are no laptops or delicate experiments crowding the walls.

Continue reading “Space Station Astronauts Stay Fit With Floating Badminton Match” »

Researchers in the Technion Department of Materials Science and Engineering have succeeded in changing a material’s electrical properties by vacating an oxygen atom from the original structure. Possible applications include electronic-device miniaturization and radiation detection.

What do ultrasound imaging of a fetus, cellular mobile communication, micro motors, and low-energy-consumption computer memories have in common? All of these technologies are based on ferroelectric materials, which are characterized by a strong correlation between their atomic structure and the electrical and mechanical properties.

Technion–Israel Institute of Technology researchers have succeeded in changing the properties of ferroelectric materials by vacating a single oxygen atom from the original structure. The breakthrough could pave the way for the development of new technologies. The research was headed by Assistant Professor Yachin Ivry of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, accompanied by postdoctoral researcher Dr. Hemaprabha Elangovan and Ph.D. student Maya Barzilay, and was published in ACS Nano. It is noted that engineering an individual oxygen vacancy poses a considerable challenge due to the light weight of oxygen atoms.

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Using the world’s smallest computer, University of Michigan (UM) researchers were able to figure out why one species of snail was able to survive a situation that pushed more than 50 others into extinction.

“We were able to get data that nobody had been able to obtain,” researcher David Blaauw said in a press release. “And that’s because we had a tiny computing system that was small enough to stick on a snail.”

Continue reading “Snails Wearing World’s Tiniest Computer Solve Extinction Mystery” »