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Category: computing – Page 678

The US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has created a brain-computer interface that enables a person to control everything from a swarm of drones to an advanced fighter jet using nothing but their thoughts and a special brain chip.

Life imitates art, in defense tech no less than in society. In the 1982 techno-thriller film “Firefox,” Clint Eastwood steals a fictional Soviet fighter jet called the “MiG-31 Firefox,” a Mach 6-capable stealth fighter he piloted with his thoughts. But now in 2018, the US military has gone even further: you can control a whole group of drones or fighter jets with your thoughts.

A F-22 Raptor fighter jet of the 95th Fighter Squadron from Tyndall, Florida approaches a KC-135 Stratotanker from the 100th Air Refueling Wing at the Royal Air Force Base in Mildenhall in Britain as they fly over the Baltic Sea towards the newly established NATO airbase of Aemari, Estonia September 4, 2015.

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Think of the Sahara, with its windswept dunes shining in the sunlight. Some people might see barren land, with minimal water or life and scorching temperatures. Others see a potential solution to a looming energy crisis, and one that could potentially make it rain in one of the largest deserts in the world.

In a paper published this week in Science researchers found that by building out huge wind and solar farms across the desert, they could not only provide a stunning amount of power to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, but they could simultaneously change the climate—increasing heat, but also increasing precipitation and vegetation in areas that could sorely use the added greenery. They estimate that such a venture could double the rainfall in the region, and increase vegetation cover by about 20 percent.

How much green are we talking? The Sahara covers 3.55 million square miles (9.2 million square kilometers). In the study, the researchers ran computer models that placed wind turbines across the desert close to a mile apart, and covered 20 percent of the desert with solar panels in different configurations (sometimes the panels were spread across the desert in a checkerboard pattern, and in other cases were concentrated in quadrants). Smaller coverage produced smaller climate impacts—in this case, less precipitation—but much of it depended on the location of the turbines and panels as well. For example, installing panels in the northwest corner had a larger impact than the other three desert options.

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Lowell interviews the always fascinating Professor George Church in this new podcast series about aging research. Lifespan.io will be appearing on the show soon too so watch this space bigsmile

Harvard & MIT Professor, author of Regenesis, methods for 1st genome sequence (1994) & 10M-fold improvements (NGS, nanopore), genome editing, writing and recording. In this episode, we get to talk about Genghis Khan, Woolly Mammoth, storing data in DNA, advice for people getting started, and more all in under one hour!

George is one of the most interesting and down to earth people you’ll read about (might be from the future or an alien, but cannot confirm). He is always working to make all of our lives better. Anytime you are looking for inspiration, do what I do, and learn about what he and his team are working on. I always feel like I can do anything after reading or listening to the current things he is working on. I hope to one day contribute like he does! As a side note: I am working on something that was inspired from our discussion, so we shall see how that goes. If anyone is inspired after listening to him talk, please email me and let me know. We can start a fan group around George and scientists in general. Scientists are the unsung superheros of our society! Also, scroll down to the bottom to see the breadth of his work. I felt like it should be put here in it’s entirety. Hyperlinked show notes will go up tonight for this episode and the previous ones that are lacking them!

“George Church, professor at Harvard & MIT, co-author of 480 papers, 130 patent publications & the book ”Regenesis”, developed methods used for the first genome sequence (1994) & million-fold cost reductions since (via NGS and nanopores), plus barcoding, DNA assembly from chips, genome editing, writing & recoding. He co-initiated the BRAIN Initiative (2011) & Genome Projects (1984, 2005) to provide & interpret the world’s only open-access personal precision medicine datasets.

Continue reading “Dr. George Church and I Discuss the Woolly Mammoth, Human Aging, DNA Data Storage, and Other Amazing Projects Coming Out of His Lab with Advice for People Getting Started” | >

Yale University researchers have demonstrated one of the key steps in building the architecture for modular quantum computers: the “teleportation” of a quantum gate between two qubits, on demand.

The findings appear online Sept. 5 in the journal Nature.

The key principle behind this new work is quantum teleportation, a unique feature of quantum mechanics that has previously been used to transmit unknown quantum states between two parties without physically sending the state itself. Using a theoretical protocol developed in the 1990s, Yale researchers experimentally demonstrated a quantum operation, or “gate,” without relying on any direct interaction. Such gates are necessary for quantum computation that relies on networks of separate quantum systems—an architecture that many researchers say can offset the errors that are inherent in quantum computing processors.

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Intel Corporation’s quantum computing experts Jim Clarke and Anne Matsuura and their partners at QuTech in the Netherlands explain the promises of the emerging technology around quantum computing.

Learn more about Intel’s role in quantum computing: https://newsroom.intel.com/press-kits/quantum-computing/

Read about Anne Matsuura and her work: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/building-future-computer-look-like-no-other/

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Rice University atomic physicists have verified a key prediction from a 55-year-old theory about one-dimensional electronics that is increasingly relevant thanks to Silicon Valley’s inexorable quest for miniaturization.

“Chipmakers have been shrinking feature sizes on microchips for decades, and device physicists are now exploring the use of nanowires and nanotubes where the channels that electrons pass through are almost one-dimensional,” said Rice experimental physicist Randy Hulet. “That’s important because 1D is a different ballgame in terms of electron conductance. You need a new model, a new way of representing reality, to make sense of it.”

With IBM and others committed to incorporating one-dimensional carbon nanotubes into integrated circuits, chip designs will increasingly need to account for 1D effects that arise from electrons being fermions, antisocial particles that are unwilling to share space.

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