Lifeboat Foundation

BLACKSBURG, Va. (WFXR) – As housing prices across the country continue to skyrocket, an Iowa-based company, Alquist 3D, is looking to combat the crisis by 3D-printing homes.

Alquist, one of a few U.S. companies that 3D-prints houses, is looking to build 200 of these homes in Virginia starting this summer.

The process is somewhat simple. First, a person designs what they want the frame of the house to look like by using a computer program. Then, a file is transmitted to a machine, which tells it what to do and how to move.

The failures of One Laptop per Child have much to teach us about fixing educational inequities.

PsiQuantum, founded in 2016 by four researchers with roots at Bristol University, Stanford University, and York University, is one of a few quantum computing startups that’s kept a moderately low PR profile. (That’s if you disregard the roughly $700 million in funding it has attracted.) The main reason is PsiQuantum has eschewed the clamorous public chase for NISQ (near-term intermediate scale quantum) computers and set out to develop a million-qubit system the company says will deliver big gains on big problems as soon as it arrives.

When will that be?

Continue reading “PsiQuantum’s Path to 1 Million Qubits by the Middle of the Decade” »

Existing memristive devices cannot be reconfigured to meet the diverse volatile and non-volatile switching requirements, and hence rely on tailored material designs specific to the targeted application, limiting their universality. “Reconfigurable memristors” that combine both ionic diffusive and drift mechanisms could address these limitations, but they remain elusive. Here we present a reconfigurable halide perovskite nanocrystal memristor that achieves on-demand switching between diffusive/volatile and drift/non-volatile modes by controllable electrochemical reactions. Judicious selection of the perovskite nanocrystals and organic capping ligands enable state-of-the-art endurance performances in both modes – volatile (2 × 10⁶ cycles) and non-volatile (5.6 × 10³ cycles). We demonstrate the relevance of such proof-of-concept perovskite devices on a benchmark reservoir network with volatile recurrent and non-volatile readout layers based on 19,900 measurements across 25 dynamically-configured devices.

Google has developed a discrete time crystal on a quantum computer. However, claims that it violates thermodynamics are untrue.

Crucially, the Nissan-NASA partnership is also focusing on batteries that don’t rely on rare metals, like cobalt (of which more than half the global supply is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as highlighted in an episode of the New York Times Daily podcast last month), nickel, or manganese.

But getting rid of those metals means finding materials with comparable properties to replace them, which will be no simple task. Here’s where NASA’s computing chops will lend the partnership a much-needed hand. They plan to create an original material informatics platform—that is, a massive database that runs simulations of how various materials interact with one another. When the platform narrows countless options and combinations down to a few prime candidates, researchers can then start testing them.

Nissan has targeted 2028 as the year to roll out its proprietary solid-state batteries. How realistic that timing turns out to be remains to be seen (Toyota is even more ambitious, aiming to have its own vehicles with solid-state batteries on the market by 2025), b ut Nissan is putting its money where its mouth is with plans to open a pilot plant in Japan in 2024. How this plays out will be revelatory, as scaling up manufacturing of solid-state batteries has produced unexpected complications in the past. Encouragingly, startup Solid Power ha s also targeted 2028 for comm ercializing its solid-state batteries.

Elon Musk believes his Neuralink brain chip could help treat morbid obesity. Experts say the billionaire’s dream isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem.

“I don’t think it is any more implausible than other claims for the potential of neurotechnology,” Professor Andrew Jackson, an expert in neural interfaces at Newcastle University, told Insider.

Continue reading “Elon Musk said his Neuralink brain chip could help treat morbid obesity. Scientists say it’s a long shot — but not an impossibility” »

For years, the brain has been thought of as a biological computer that processes information through traditional circuits, whereby data zips straight from one cell to another. While that model is still accurate, a new study led by Salk Professor Thomas Albright and Staff Scientist Sergei Gepshtein shows that there’s also a second, very different way that the brain parses information: through the interactions of waves of neural activity. The findings, published in Science Advances on April 22, 2022, help researchers better understand how the brain processes information.

“We now have a new understanding of how the computational machinery of the brain is working,” says Albright, the Conrad T. Prebys Chair in Vision Research and director of Salk’s Vision Center Laboratory. “The model helps explain how the brain’s underlying state can change, affecting people’s attention, focus, or ability to process information.”

Researchers have long known that waves of electrical activity exist in the brain, both during sleep and wakefulness. But the underlying theories as to how the brain processes information—particularly sensory information, like the sight of a light or the sound of a bell—have revolved around information being detected by specialized brain cells and then shuttled from one neuron to the next like a relay.