Lifeboat Foundation

Miniaturization has enabled technology like smartphones, health watches, medical probes and nano-satellites, all unthinkable a couple decades ago. Just imagine that in the course of 60 years, the transistor has shrunk from the size of your palm to 14 nanometers in dimension, 1000 times smaller than the diameter of a hair.

Miniaturization has pushed technology to a new era of optical circuitry. But in parallel, it has also triggered new challenges and obstacles, for example, controlling and guiding light at the nanometer scale. Researchers are looking for techniques to confine light into extremely tiny spaces, millions of times smaller than current ones. Studies had earlier found that metals can compress light below the wavelength-scale (diffraction limit).

In that aspect, graphene, a material composed from a single layer of carbon atoms, which exhibits exceptional optical and electrical properties, is capable of guiding light in the form of plasmons, which are oscillations of electrons that strongly interact with light. These graphene plasmons have a natural ability to confine light to very small spaces. However, until now, it was only possible to confine these plasmons in one direction, while the actual ability of light to interact with small particles like atoms and molecules resides in the volume into which it can be compressed. This type of confinement in all three dimensions is commonly regarded as an optical cavity.

A pair of new security threats to Intel-based computer systems have been revealed. The beleaguered semiconductor chip manufacturer has faced a seemingly endless series of vulnerabilities over the past two years.

Although no known attacks have occurred, two teams of researchers have confirmed vulnerabilities in what is supposed to be the safest neighborhood within Intel processor architecture.

One attack, dubbed SGAxe, can gain entry into Intel’s Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) services that were specifically designed to protect critical data in the event of massive assault elsewhere in a system. A hacker theoretically can steal cryptographic keys stored in SGX and use them to break security measures protecting sensitive data such as financial records, copyrighted content or passwords.

Engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a versatile microfluidic lab-on-a-chip that uses sound waves to create tunnels in oil to touchlessly manipulate and transport droplets. The technology could form the basis of a small-scale, programmable, rewritable biomedical chip that is completely reusable to enable on-site diagnostics or laboratory research.

The results appear online on June 10 in the journal Science Advances.

“Our new system achieves rewritable routing, sorting and gating of droplets with minimal external control, which are essential functions for the digital logic control of droplets,” said Tony Jun Huang, the William Bevan Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke. “And we achieve it with less energy and a simpler setup that can control more droplets simultaneously than previous systems.”

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Soft Materials Research Center (SMRC) have discovered an elusive phase of matter, first proposed more than 100 years ago and sought after ever since.

The team describes the discovery of what scientists call a “ferroelectric nematic” phase of liquid crystal in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The discovery opens a door to a new universe of materials, said co-author Matt Glaser, a professor in the Department of Physics.

Nematic liquid crystals have been a hot topic in materials research since the 1970s. These materials exhibit a curious mix of fluid- and solid-like behaviors, which allow them to control light. Engineers have used them extensively to make the liquid crystal displays (LCDs) in many laptops, TVs and cellphones.

Plug And Play

The underlying mechanics of a quantum computer won’t be any less difficult to comprehend under Gil’s vision of the future. But, he argues, it won’t matter because programming quantum computing software would become far more automated along the way.

“You’ll simply have to write a line of code in any programming language you work with,” Gil wrote, “and the system will match it with the circuit in the library and the right quantum computer.”

Mobile phones and computers are currently responsible for up to 8% of the electricity use in the world. This figure has been doubling each past decade but nothing prevents it from skyrocketing in the future. Unless we find a way for boosting energy efficiency in information and communications technology, that is. An international team of researchers, including Ikerbasque Research Associate Alexey Nikitin (DIPC), has just published in Nature ¹ a breakthrough in quantum physics that could deliver exactly that: electronics and communications technology with ultralow energy consumption.

Future information and communication technologies will rely on the manipulation of not only electrons but also of light at the nanometer-scale. Squeezing light to such a small size has been a major goal in nanophotonics for many years. Particularly strong light squeezing can be achieved with polaritons, quasiparticles resulting from the strong coupling of photons with a dipole-carrying excitation, at infrared frequencies in two-dimensional materials, such as graphene and hexagonal boron nitride. Polaritons can be found in materials consisting of two-dimensional layers bound by weak van der Waals forces, the so-called van der Waals materials. These polaritons can be tuned by electric fields or by adjusting the material thickness, leading to applications including nanolasers, tunable infrared and terahertz detectors, and molecular sensors.

But there is a major problem: even though polaritons can have long lifetimes, they have always been found to propagate along all directions (isotropic) of the material surface, thereby losing energy quite fast, which limits their application potential.

Quantum computing is still the province of specialized programmers—but that is likely to change very quickly.

Circa 2017

We have sequenced the genome of the endangered European eel using the MinION by Oxford Nanopore, and assembled these data using a novel algorithm specifically designed for large eukaryotic genomes. For this 860 Mbp genome, the entire computational process takes two days on a single CPU. The resulting genome assembly significantly improves on a previous draft based on short reads only, both in terms of contiguity (N50 1.2 Mbp) and structural quality. This combination of affordable nanopore sequencing and light weight assembly promises to make high-quality genomic resources accessible for many non-model plants and animals.

The president also ordered a boost in the education of specialists in genetics and genome sequencing and the domestic production of necessary laboratory equipment, as well as tax cuts for biomedical research. Russia will also open world-class genome research centers which will, among their immediate goals, work on the development of treatments and vaccines for Covid-19.

The future database will be one of the tools that Russia hopes to use to assume a leading position in the biomedical industry. The government sees it as crucial for keeping the country competitive on the world stage going forward.

The Kurchatov Institute, which is best known for nuclear research, has been tasked with laying the foundation for the database, choosing the storage format and making tools for search and analysis. The institute has experience in the secure handling of large amounts of sensitive data and operates a number of data centers across Russia which are used for scientific collaboration projects.