The PC industry had given up on Intel ever producing its own powerful desktop graphics cards after the company unceremoniously killed its Larrabee project 10 years ago last month. Now, we’re seeing the Intel DG1, the company’s first discrete graphics card, at CES 2020.
IBM announced a new 28-qubit quantum system backend, Raleigh and achieved a system demonstrating Quantum Volume of 32. This is double the quantum volume of 16 of a prior IBM system.
Quantum Volume (QV) is a hardware-agnostic metric that we defined to measure the performance of a real quantum computer. Each system IBM develop brings us along a path where complex problems will be more efficiently addressed by quantum computing; therefore, the need for system benchmarks is crucial, and simply counting qubits is not enough. Quantum Volume takes into account the number of qubits, connectivity, and gate and measurement errors. Material improvements to underlying physical hardware, such as increases in coherence times, reduction of device crosstalk, and software circuit compiler efficiency, can point to measurable progress in Quantum Volume, as long as all improvements happen at a similar pace.
Stephen Hawking passed away on 14 March 2018. His work changed literally everything we know about the cosmos and our place in it. But his greatest contribution to our species wasn’t his theories on black holes or how quickly the universe was expanding, it was his humanity.
Professor Hawking was born on 8 January 1942. He would have been 78 years old today – a bit older than ‘boomer’ age, his generation was called the “Silent” one. In his early twenties he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). Eventually he became paralyzed and could only speak with the assistance a computer-generated audio device.
If this works that would be awesome.
It is estimated by The National Kidney Foundation that over 100,000 patients are on the waiting list for kidney donors. A further 3,000 names are added to the list every year. An average patient has to wait for 3.6 years for a viable transplant. The patients are treated with dialysis while they are waiting for a transplant and only one in three patients survive for more than five years without a transplant. All that could change as scientists have developed the world’s first artificial kidney.
This bio-hybrid uses living kidney cells along with a series of specialized microchips powered by the human heart to filter waste from the blood-stream. The artificial kidney can bypass the complication of matching donors and tissue rejection. To address this unmet need, William Fissell from Vanderbilt and Shuvo Roy from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) launched The Kidney Project.
A 2017 report of the discovery of a particular kind of Majorana fermion — the chiral Majorana fermion, referred to as the “angel particle” — is likely a false alarm, according to new research. Majorana fermions are enigmatic particles that act as their own antiparticle and were first hypothesized to exist in 1937. They are of immense interest to physicists because their unique properties could allow them to be used in the construction of a topological quantum computer.
A team of physicists at Penn State and the University of Wurzburg in Germany led by Cui-Zu Chang, an assistant professor of physics at Penn State studied over three dozen devices similar to the one used to produce the angel particle in the 2017 report. They found that the feature that was claimed to be the manifestation of the angel particle was unlikely to be induced by the existence of the angel particle. A paper describing the research appears on January 3, 2020 in the journal Science.
“When the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana predicted the possibility of a new fundamental particle which is its own antiparticle, little could he have envisioned the long-lasting implications of his imaginative idea.”
Neurological conditions or injuries that result in the inability to communicate can be devastating. Patients with such speech loss often rely on alternative communication devices that use brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) or nonverbal head or eye movements to control a cursor to spell out words. While these systems can enhance quality-of-life, they can only produce around 5–10 words per minute, far slower than the natural rate of human speech.
Researchers from the University of California San Francisco today published details of a neural decoder that can transform brain activity into intelligible synthesized speech at the rate of a fluent speaker (Nature 10.1038/s41586-019‑1119-1).
“It has been a longstanding goal of our lab to create technology to restore communication for patients with severe speech disabilities,” explains neurosurgeon Edward Chang. “We want to create technologies that can generate synthesized speech directly from human brain activity. This study provides a proof-of-principle that this is possible.”
Intel introducing the ‘Horse Ridge’ to help enable Quantum Computers that are commercially viable, compared to the current models.
A wave of startups wants to make brain-computer interfaces accessible without needing surgery. Just strap on the device and think.
The accelerator-on-a-chip demonstrated in Science is just a prototype, but Vuckovic said its design and fabrication techniques can be scaled up to deliver particle beams accelerated enough to perform cutting-edge experiments in chemistry, materials science and biological discovery that don’t require the power of a massive accelerator.
“The largest accelerators are like powerful telescopes. There are only a few in the world and scientists must come to places like SLAC to use them,” Vuckovic said. “We want to miniaturize accelerator technology in a way that makes it a more accessible research tool.”
Team members liken their approach to the way that computing evolved from the mainframe to the smaller but still useful PC. Accelerator-on-a-chip technology could also lead to new cancer radiation therapies, said physicist Robert Byer, a co-author of the Science paper. Again, it’s a matter of size.
Today, medical X-ray machines fill a room and deliver a beam of radiation that’s tough to focus on tumors, requiring patients to wear lead shields to minimize collateral damage.
