Lifeboat Foundation

Mars in 4 K.

A world first. New footage from Mars rendered in stunning 4K resolution. We also talk about the cameras on board the Martian rovers and how we made the video.

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Circa 2017

Data storage technology continues to shrink in size and grow in capacity, but scientists have just taken things to the next level — they’ve built a nanoscale hard drive using a single atom.

Continue reading “IBM Seriously Just Turned an Atom Into The World’s Smallest Hard Drive” »

A group of international scientists have substantially lengthened the duration of time that a spin-orbit qubit in silicon can retain quantum information for, opening up a new pathway to make silicon quantum computers more scalable and functional.

Spin-orbit qubits have been investigated for over a decade as an option to scale up the number of qubits in a quantum computer, as they are easy to manipulate and couple over long distances. However, they have always shown very limited coherence times, far too short for quantum technologies.

The research published today in Nature Materials shows that long coherence times are possible when spin-orbit coupling is strong enough. In fact, the scientists demonstrated coherence times 10,000 times longer than previously recorded for spin-orbit qubits, making them an ideal candidate for scaling up silicon quantum computers.

Amid ever-increasing demands for privacy and security for highly sensitive data stored in the cloud, Google Cloud announced this week the creation of Confidential Computing.

Terming it a “breakthrough technology,” Google said the technology, which will offer a number of products in the coming months, allows users to encrypt sensitive data not only as it is stored or sent to the cloud, but while it is being worked on as well.

Confidential Computing keeps data encrypted as it’s being “used, indexed, queried, or trained on” in memory and “elsewhere outside the central processing unit,” Google said in a statement about the new technology.

Scientists have managed to draw at high resolution and speed, local patterns in organic semiconductor films used in optoelectronic and photonic applications. The new method enables the patterning of material characteristics and concomitant final properties, including molecular conformation, orientation, crystallinity and composition. The technique, published with open access in Nature Communications, has also been patented and industrial partners are sought for further co-development.

Bridging the gap between organic electronics and the worldwide deployed silicon electronics requires new low cost and low energy consumption fabrication methods and technologies. This work represents a key enabling technology to accelerate the use of flexible and light-weight organic electronics and photonics to the level of silicon-based devices.

The microstructure and composition of organic semiconductors need to be tuned locally in order to optimize their properties, such as charge carrier mobility, electrical conductivity and light emission; and expand their functionalities for the practical upscaling of applications such as organic transistors (OFETs) and light emitting diodes (OLEDs), organic photovoltaics (OPV), organic thermoelectric generators (OTEGs), and organic photonic structures.

U.K.-led research team packs more than 200 photonic components onto a chip that performs reconfigurable quantum information processing with light.

Amazing.

Brain-computer interface could also give people ‘enhanced abilities’.

So, you’ve set aside a chunk of change to build a new gaming PC and are just waiting for AMD and Nvidia to launch their next-gen GPUs, is that it? A solid plan, except for one thing—your next build is already obsolete. That’s because whatever you spec’d out is undoubtedly sitting on an AMD or Intel foundation, and didn’t you hear, x86 computing is basically dead. Finished. Kaput. We’re on the cusp of the end of an era, and all because Apple is dumping Intel for ARM.

Okay, maybe not, but that’s essentially the case made by Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive who led the development of Mac computers in the late 1980s. In no uncertain terms, he says Apple’s decision to phase out Intel CPUs in favor of its own silicon based on ARM will force “PC OEMs to reconsider their allegiance to x86 silicon…and that will have serious consequences for the old Wintel partnership.”

A new device that relies on flowing clouds of ultracold atoms promises potential tests of the intersection between the weirdness of the quantum world and the familiarity of the macroscopic world we experience every day. The atomtronic Superconducting QUantum Interference Device (SQUID) is also potentially useful for ultrasensitive rotation measurements and as a component in quantum computers.

“In a conventional SQUID, the quantum interference in electron currents can be used to make one of the most sensitive magnetic field detectors,” said Changhyun Ryu, a physicist with the Material Physics and Applications Quantum group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We use neutral atoms rather than charged electrons. Instead of responding to magnetic fields, the atomtronic version of a SQUID is sensitive to mechanical rotation.”

Although small, at only about 10 millionths of a meter across, the atomtronic SQUID is thousands of times larger than the molecules and atoms that are typically governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. The relatively large scale of the device lets it test theories of macroscopic realism, which could help explain how the world we are familiar with is compatible with the quantum weirdness that rules the universe on very small scales. On a more pragmatic level, atomtronic SQUIDs could offer highly sensitive rotation sensors or perform calculations as part of quantum computers.