Quantum experiment conducted on Google’s Sycamore 2 computer transferred data across two simulated black holes, adding weight to the holographic principle of the universe.
Elon Musk is trying to help the paralyzed to move again, through electrodes in the cerebral cortex.
Neuralink, the strange and somewhat vague brainchild of Elon Musk, held an event Wednesday that the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter called a “show and tell.” And show and tell it did — as a monkey welcomed the audience by typing a message through a brain-computer interface.
Neuralink’s product records action potentials of neurons in the brain. This is done by placing an electrode close enough to the synapse of two neurons in the brain and taking a recording of its electrical impulse.
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In science fiction – think films and TV like “Interstellar” and “Star Trek” – wormholes in the cosmos serve as portals through space and time for spacecraft to traverse unimaginable distances with ease. If only it were that simple.
Scientists have long pursued a deeper understanding of wormholes and now appear to be making progress. Researchers announced on Wednesday that they forged two minuscule simulated black holes – those extraordinarily dense celestial objects with gravity so powerful that not even light can escape – in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time.
In May 2022, the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) payload onboard a small CubeSat satellite was launched into orbit 300 miles above Earth’s surface. Since then, TBIRD has delivered terabytes of data at record-breaking rates of up to 100 gigabits per second—100 times faster than the fastest internet speeds in most cities—via an optical communication link to a ground-based receiver in California.
This data rate is more than 1,000 times higher than that of the radio-frequency links traditionally used for satellite communication and the highest ever achieved by a laser link from space to ground. And these record-setting speeds were all made possible by a communications payload roughly the size of a tissue box.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory conceptualized the TBIRD mission in 2014 as a means of providing unprecedented capability to science missions at low cost. Science instruments in space today routinely generate more data than can be returned to Earth over typical space-to-ground communications links. With small, low-cost space and ground terminals, TBIRD can enable scientists from around the world to fully take advantage of laser communications to downlink all the data they could ever dream of.
Tune in at 6:00pm PT / 9:00pm ET on Wed. Nov. 30 when Neuralink’s Elon Musk reveals the latest advancements in Neuralink’s brain-computer interface technology.
Neuralink: Everything to Know About Elon Musk’s Brain Chip https://youtu.be/Qih2NJwt56c.
Elon Musk’s Next Neuralink Demo Is Coming. Here’s How to Watch https://cnet.co/3u81ixw.
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Elon Musk and researchers at Neuralink reveal a series of demos showing the progress in the company’s brain-computer interface technologies.
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IT WAS March 2018. The atmosphere at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the Los Angeles Convention Center was highly charged. The session had been moved to the atrium to accommodate the crowds, but people still had to cram onto the balconies to get a view of the action.
Rumours had it that Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had something momentous to report. He and his colleagues had been experimenting with graphene, sheets of carbon just a single atom thick that are peeled from the graphite found in pencil lead. Graphene was already celebrated for its various promising electronic properties, and much more besides.
Here, Jarillo-Herrero showed that if you stacked two graphene sheets and twisted, or rotated, one relative to the other at certain “magic angles”, you could make the material an insulator, where electric current barely flows, or a superconductor, where current flows with zero resistance. It was a staggering trick, and potentially hugely significant because superconductivity holds promise for applications ranging from quantum computing to nuclear fusion.
Scientists have, for the first time, developed a quantum experiment that allows them to study the dynamics, or behavior, of a special kind of theoretical wormhole. The experiment has not created an actual wormhole (a rupture in space and time), rather it allows researchers to probe connections between theoretical wormholes and quantum physics, a prediction of so-called quantum gravity. Quantum gravity refers to a set of theories that seek to connect gravity with quantum physics, two fundamental and well-studied descriptions of nature that appear inherently incompatible with each other.
“We found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole yet is sufficiently small to implement on today’s quantum hardware,” says Maria Spiropulu, the principal investigator of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science research program Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics (QCCFP) and the Shang-Yi Ch’en Professor of Physics at Caltech. “This work constitutes a step toward a larger program of testing quantum gravity physics using a quantum computer. It does not substitute for direct probes of quantum gravity in the same way as other planned experiments that might probe quantum gravity effects in the future using quantum sensing, but it does offer a powerful testbed to exercise ideas of quantum gravity.”
The research will be published December 1 in the journal Nature. The study’s first authors are Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University and Alexander Zlokapa (BS ‘21), a former undergraduate student at Caltech who started on this project for his bachelor’s thesis with Spiropulu and has since moved on to graduate school at MIT.
Wormholes — wrinkles in the fabric of spacetime that connect two disparate locations — may seem like the stuff of science fiction. But whether or not they exist in reality, studying these hypothetical objects could be the key to making concrete the tantalizing link between information and matter that has bedeviled physicists for decades.
Surprisingly, a quantum computer is an ideal platform to investigate this connection. The trick is to use a correspondence called AdS/CFT, which establishes an equivalence between a theory that describes gravity and spacetime (and wormholes) in a fictional world with a special geometry (AdS) to a quantum theory that does not contain gravity at all (CFT).
In “Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor”, published in Nature today, we report on a collaboration with researchers at Caltech, Harvard, MIT, and Fermilab to simulate the CFT on the Google Sycamore processor. By studying this quantum theory on the processor, we are able to leverage the AdS/CFT correspondence to probe the dynamics of a quantum system equivalent to a wormhole in a model of gravity. The Google Sycamore processor is among the first to have the fidelity needed to carry out this experiment.