Lifeboat Foundation

As if battered post-Christmas finances, a looming disorderly Brexit and the prospect of a fresh nuclear arms race were not enough to dampen spirits, astronomers have declared that a nearby galaxy will slam into the Milky Way and could knock our solar system far into the cosmic void.

The unfortunate discovery was made after scientists ran computer simulations on the movement of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the many satellite galaxies that orbits the Milky Way. Rather than circling at a safe distance, or breaking free of the Milky Way’s gravitational pull, the researchers found the LMC is destined to clatter into the galaxy we call home.

At the moment, the LMC is estimated to be about 163,000 light years from the Milky Way and speeding away at 250 miles per second. But simulations by astrophysicists at Durham University show that the LMC will eventually slow down and turn back towards us, ultimately smashing into the Milky Way in about 2.5 billion years’ time.

Continue reading “Nearby galaxy set to collide with Milky Way, say scientists” »

The same codes needed to thwart errors in quantum computers may also give the fabric of space-time its intrinsic robustness.

Yale University physicists suggest that Schrödinger’s cat can exist — alive or dead — in two boxes at once, a finding that could help further the development of reliable quantum computers.

Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife Priscilla Chan have sold close to 30 million shares of Facebook to fund an ambitious biomedical research project, called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), with a goal of curing all disease within a generation. A less publicized component of that US$5 billion program includes work on brain-machine interfaces, devices that essentially translate thoughts into commands.

From a report: One recent project is a wireless brain implant that can record, stimulate and disrupt the movement of a monkey in real time. In a paper published in the highly cited scientific journal Nature on Monday, researchers detail a wireless brain device implanted in a primate that records, stimulates, and modifies its brain activity in real time, sensing a normal movement and stopping it immediately. Those researchers are part of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a non-profit medical research group within the CZI. Scientists refer to the interference as “therapy” because it is designed to be used to treat diseases like epilepsy or Parkinson’s by stopping a seizure or other disruptive motion just as it starts.

“Our device is able to monitor the primate’s brain while it’s providing the therapy so you know exactly what’s happening,” Rikky Muller, a co-author of the new study, told Business Insider. A professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, Muller is also a Biohub investigator. The applications of brain-machine interfaces are far-reaching: while some researchers focus on using them to help assist people with spinal cord injuries or other illnesses that affect movement, others aim to see them transform how everyone interacts with laptops and smartphones. Both a division at Facebook formerly called Building 8 as well as an Elon Musk-founded company called Neuralink have said they are working on the latter.

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg-Funded Researchers Test Implantable Brain Devices” »

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have recorded, for the first time, the “temporal coherence” of a graphene qubit—meaning how long it can maintain a special state that allows it to represent two logical states simultaneously. The demonstration, which used a new kind of graphene-based qubit, represents a critical step forward for practical quantum computing, the researchers say.

Superconducting quantum bits (simply, qubits) are artificial atoms that use various methods to produce bits of quantum information, the fundamental component of quantum computers. Similar to traditional binary circuits in computers, qubits can maintain one of two states corresponding to the classic binary bits, a 0 or 1. But these qubits can also be a superposition of both states simultaneously, which could allow quantum computers to solve complex problems that are practically impossible for traditional computers.

The amount of time that these qubits stay in this superposition state is referred to as their “coherence time.” The longer the coherence time, the greater the ability for the qubit to compute complex problems.

And they’re getting closer to the marketplace all the time.

• By Stuart Biles on December 28, 2018

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

On the second balmy day of the year in New York, Neil Harbisson, a Catalan artist, musician, and self-professed “cyborg,” walked into a café in the Nolita district of Manhattan. The actor Gabriel Byrne was sitting at a table in the corner. Harbisson approached. “May I do a sound portrait of you? It will just take one minute. For nine years, I’ve been listening to colors,” he explained.

Byrne eyed his questioner from under raised eyebrows. On a slight frame, the 30-year-old Harbisson wore a white T-shirt, deep-pink jeans and black-and-white showman’s brogues. His face was angular, with an aquiline nose and a chin smudged with grown-out stubble. A small plastic oval floated in front of his forehead, attached to the end of a flexible stem that reached around from the back of his head and over a sandy pageboy mop, like the light on the head of an angler fish. This “eyeborg,” as Harbisson calls it, converts light into audible sound, with a pitch that varies according to the color of the light.

Continue reading “What Makes You So Special” »

One small amoeba found a solution to the traveling salesman problem faster than our best algorithms. What does it know that we don’t?

These days, movies and video games render increasingly realistic 3D images on 2-D screens, giving viewers the illusion of gazing into another world. For many physicists, though, keeping things flat is far more interesting.

One reason is that flat landscapes can unlock new movement patterns in the quantum world of atoms and electrons. For instance, shedding the third dimension enables an entirely new class of particles to emerge—particles that that don’t fit neatly into the two classes, bosons and fermions, provided by nature. These new particles, known as anyons, change in novel ways when they swap places, a feat that could one day power a special breed of quantum computer.

But anyons and the conditions that produce them have been exceedingly hard to spot in experiments. In a pair of papers published this week in Physical Review Letters, JQI Fellow Alexey Gorshkov and several collaborators proposed new ways of studying this unusual flat physics, suggesting that small numbers of constrained atoms could act as stand-ins for the finicky electrons first predicted to exhibit low-dimensional quirks.