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Category: computing – Page 727

Manipulating atoms one at a time with an electron beam

The ultimate degree of control for engineering would be the ability to create and manipulate materials at the most basic level, fabricating devices atom by atom with precise control.

Now, scientists at MIT, the University of Vienna, and several other institutions have taken a step in that direction, developing a method that can reposition atoms with a highly focused electron and control their exact location and bonding orientation. The finding could ultimately lead to new ways of making quantum computing devices or sensors, and usher in a new age of “atomic engineering,” they say.

The advance is described today in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering Ju Li, graduate student Cong Su, Professor Toma Susi of the University of Vienna, and 13 others at MIT, the University of Vienna, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and in China, Ecuador, and Denmark.

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XPS 15 2-in-1’s maglev keyboard may find its way into other Dell laptops — Frank Azor

Much ado has been made of Dell’s new maglev keyboard, currently exclusive to the XPS 15 9575 2-in-1. Utilizing rare-earth magnets to repulse the keys back up once depressed, the keyboard still provides a decent amount of feedback despite its meager 0.7mm of travel.

In a late March webcast for Dell’s new products, the company’s Vice President & General Manager Alienware, Gaming and XPS, Frank Azor, mentioned that the keyboard could be adopted in more of Dell’s laptops — if it proves popular.

The major advantage of design is that it allows the laptop to be thinner, but not everyone is a fan. Though it provides more travel and feedback than Apple’s much-maligned “butterfly” keyboard, initial reviews suggest that the keyboard is basically tolerable, but it isn’t going to replace a ThinkPad’s keyboard anytime soon.

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Laptops to get maglev keyboards that reduce their thickness

Magnetic levitation keyboards have been around for a while, but they’ve never really taken off, or floated our boats, or attracted much atten… Anyway, a Taiwanese manufacturer called Darfon is persevering with the idea, and it’s discovered that maglev keys, which rest on opposing magnets instead of mushy membranes or mechanical switches, can make laptop keyboards significantly thinner. Unfortunately, according to a CNET journalist who played with a couple of prototypes at Computex, the keys can be hard to type on if skinniness is taken to the extreme. Then again, there’s scope to change the resistance of the keyboard electronically to suit your preference, and Darfon claims it has already received orders from laptop makers who are targeting launches later this year. If that’s true, perhaps the technology isn’t so repellant after all.

[Image credit: Aloysius Low / CNET].

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Quantum cloud computing with self-check

With a quantum coprocessor in the cloud, physicists from Innsbruck, Austria, open the door to the simulation of previously unsolvable problems in chemistry, materials research or high-energy physics. The research groups led by Rainer Blatt and Peter Zoller report in the journal Nature how they simulated particle physics phenomena on 20 quantum bits and how the quantum simulator self-verified the result for the first time.

Many scientists are currently working on investigating how quantum advantage can be exploited on hardware already available today. Three years ago, physicists first simulated the spontaneous formation of a pair of elementary particles with a digital quantum computer at the University of Innsbruck. Due to the error rate, however, more complex simulations would require a large number of quantum bits that are not yet available in today’s quantum computers. The analog simulation of quantum systems in a quantum computer also has narrow limits. Using a new method, researchers around Christian Kokail, Christine Maier und Rick van Bijnen at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences have now surpassed these limits. They use a programmable ion trap quantum computer with 20 quantum bits as a quantum coprocessor, in which quantum mechanical calculations that reach the limits of classical computers are outsourced.

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Exploring people’s perception of geometric features, personalities and emotions in videos with virtual humans

Researchers at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul have recently carried out a study aimed at evaluating people’s perceptions of geometric features, personalities and emotions presented in video sequences with virtual humans. Their study, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, merges computer science tools with psychology research practices.

“Our recent work is part of a larger project in collaboration with the psychology department at our university,” the researchers told TechXplore, via email. “The main idea is to investigate emotions, personalities and cultural aspects detection in pedestrians and crowds from video sequences. In the context of the present paper, this research involving comes from the need to know if users can perceive emotions and personalities in virtual characters and if camera’s position or type of character can influence their perception.”

For their experiments, the researchers adapted a dataset that contained tracking files of pedestrians captured in spontaneous videos, changing humans in the footage into identical virtual characters. Their goal was to evaluate whether people who watched the footage could focus on the behavior of the virtual humans in the videos instead of being distracted by other features.

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