Lifeboat Foundation

A new on-chip device that is very good at mediating interactions between light and atoms in a vapour has been developed by researchers in Germany and the UK. Flavie Davidson-Marquis at Humboldt University of Berlin and colleagues call their device a “quantum-optically integrated light cage” and say that it could be used for wide range of applications in quantum information technology.

Hybrid quantum photonics is a rapidly growing area of research that integrates different optical systems within miniaturized devices. One area of interest is the creation of devices for the control, storage and retrieval of the quantum states of light using individual atoms. This is usually done by integrating on-chip photonic devices with miniaturized cells containing warm vapours of alkali atoms. However, this approach faces challenges due to inefficient vapour filling times, high losses of quantum information near cell surfaces and limited overlaps between the wavelengths of light used in optical circuits and the wavelengths of atomic transitions.

Once researchers have done the hard work of translating a set of mathematical concepts into a proof assistant, the program generates a library of computer code that can be built on by other researchers and used to define higher-level mathematical objects. In this way, proof assistants can help to verify mathematical proofs that would otherwise be time-consuming and difficult, perhaps even practically impossible, for a human to check.

Proof assistants have long had their fans, but this is the first time that they have played a major role at the cutting edge of a field, says Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London who was part of a collaboration that checked Scholze and Clausen’s result. “The big remaining question was: can they handle complex mathematics?” Says Buzzard. “We showed that they can.”

And it all happened much faster than anyone had imagined. Scholze laid out his challenge to proof-assistant experts in December 2020, and it was taken up by a group of volunteers led by Johan Commelin, a mathematician at the University of Freiburg in Germany. On 5 June — less than six months later — Scholze posted on Buzzard’s blog that the main part of the experiment had succeeded. “I find it absolutely insane that interactive proof assistants are now at the level that, within a very reasonable time span, they can formally verify difficult original research,” Scholze wrote.

Applied Materials said it has reached a breakthrough in chip wiring that will enable semiconductor chip production to miniaturize to chips so the width between circuits can be as little as three billionths of a meter. Current chip factories are making 7nm and 5nm chips, so the 3nm chips represent the next generation of technology.

These 3nm production lines will be part of factories that cost more than $22 billion to build — and generate a lot more revenue than that. The breakthrough in chip wiring will enable logic chips to scale to three nanometers and beyond, the company said.

Chip manufacturing companies can use the wiring tools in their huge factories, and the transition from 5nm factories to 3nm factories could help ease a shortage of semiconductor chips that has plagued the entire electronics industry. But it will be a while before the chips go into production. In addition to interconnect scaling challenges, there are other issues related to the transistor (extending the use of FinFET transistors and transitioning to Gate All Around transistors), as well as patterning (extreme ultraviolet and multi-patterning).

In the very last moments of the movie, however, you would also see something unusual: the sprouting of clouds of satellites, and the wrapping of the land and seas with wires made of metal and glass. You would see the sudden appearance of an intricate artificial planetary crust capable of tremendous feats of communication and calculation, enabling planetary self-awareness — indeed, planetary sapience.

The emergence of planetary-scale computation thus appears as both a geological and geophilosophical fact. In addition to evolving countless animal, vegetal and microbial species, Earth has also very recently evolved a smart exoskeleton, a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer capable of calculating things like: How old is the planet? Is the planet getting warmer? The knowledge of “climate change” is an epistemological accomplishment of planetary-scale computation.

Over the past few centuries, humans have chaotically and in many cases accidentally transformed Earth’s ecosystems. Now, in response, the emergent intelligence represented by planetary-scale computation makes it possible, and indeed necessary, to conceive an intentional, directed and worthwhile planetary-scale terraforming. The vision for this is not to be found in computing infrastructure itself, but in the purposes to which we put it.

On Jan. 15, a hacker tried to poison a water treatment plant that served parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. It didn’t seem hard.

The hacker had the username and password for a former employee’s TeamViewer account, a popular program that lets users remotely control their computers, according to a private report compiled by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center in February and seen by NBC News.

After logging in, the hacker, whose name and motive are unknown and who hasn’t been identified by law enforcement, deleted programs that the water plant used to treat drinking water.

Big Blue has, for the first time, built a quantum computer that is not physically located in its US data centers. For the company, this is the start of global quantum expansion.

Don’t miss another chance to win a powerful GPU.

Computer model simulates how interactions extend exciton lifetimes.

Check out my short video in which I explain some super exciting research in the area of nanotechnology: de novo protein lattices! I specifically discuss a journal article by Ben-Sasson et al. titled “Design of biologically active binary protein 2D materials”.

Here, I explain an exciting nanotechnology paper “Design of biologically active binary protein 2D materials” (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03120-8).

Continue reading “Synthetic protein lattices explained” »