Lifeboat Foundation

D-Wave making music.

A composer seeks to eavesdrop on the illogic at the heart of computing’s next wave.

Nice!

IBM scientists have developed a new lab-on-a-chip technology that can, for the first time, separate biological particles at the nanoscale and could help enable physicians to detect diseases such as cancer before symptoms appear.

As reported today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology (“Nanoscale Lateral Displacement Arrays for Separation of Exosomes and Colloids Down to 20nm”), the IBM team’s results show size-based separation of bioparticles down to 20 nanometers (nm) in diameter, a scale that gives access to important particles such as DNA, viruses and exosomes. Once separated, these particles can be analyzed by physicians to potentially reveal signs of disease even before patients experience any physical symptoms and when the outcome from treatment is most positive. Until now, the smallest bioparticle that could be separated by size with on-chip technologies was about 50 times or larger, for example, separation of circulating tumor cells from other biological components.

Continue reading “Lab-on-a-Chip breakthrough aims to help physicians detect cancer and diseases at the nanoscale” »

Imagine you wake up one morning burning to make the great physicist Max Planck’s face out of copper. (Just go with it.) Sure, you could sculpt it, but there’s a better way. Cut a flat copper sheet into a half-oval, and take a triangle out of the center of its straight edge. Divide it into smaller triangles, bend the sheet so that the two sides of the big triangle touch—and violà! A sheet of flat copper triangles has morphed to match every nook and cranny of Planck’s face. No sculpting required.

If that sounds like magic … well, that’s understandable, because we left a few steps out. Computer scientist Keenan Crane from Carnegie Mellon University actually did this with real copper, and you can see a computer model of the final product at the top of this article. Making Planck’s face wasn’t the point, of course: When Crane cut the sheet into carefully-designed triangles, he brought it into a class of materials known as auxetics, whose curious and complex properties have excited researchers for decades. Someday, auxetics could improve highway shock absorbers, form more comfortable and versatile shoes, and line veins that thicken when expanding.

At least, that’s what the grant applications say. “People give a lot of lip service to how it’s gonna change the world, in terms of curing cancer,” says Crane. “But at this stage people are still trying to figure out just basic questions.” Auxetics all started with a 1987 Science paper by engineer and professor Roderic Lakes. He reported a new kind of polymer foam that contradicted common sense. It expanded in one direction when stretched in another, and contracted in one direction when squeezed in another.

We spend our lives surrounded by hi-tech materials and chemicals that make our batteries, solar cells and mobile phones work. But developing new technologies requires time-consuming, expensive and even dangerous experiments.

Luckily we now have a secret weapon that allows us to save time, money and risk by avoiding some of these experiments: computers.

Continue reading “Lab 2.0: Will Computers Replace Experimental Science?” »

My new OpEd article for the San Francisco Chronicle on chip implants and transhumanism: http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Chip-en…694149.php They also did a 2-minute video of my presidential campaign: http://bit.ly/2aERJxc

The implant can do all sorts of things, like unlock my electronic house door, act as my password on my computer, and even send a text message when people with the right phone and app come near me. Keys, credit cards, ID cards, medical records and passwords — these are all things that can be replaced by a tiny chip in the hand. If having technology in your bodies sounds wacky, consider the millions of people around the world who have artificial hips or dentures, or deaf people who use cochlear implants to hear sounds. […] former Vice President Dick Cheney famously asked to have the Wi-Fi on his heart valve turned off, just in case terrorists tried to hack it. A company in Sylmar (Los Angeles County) called Second Sight already has FDA approval for bionic eyes.

Post-Quantum is a slow-burning, brilliant oddity of a startup. We assess its prospects.

If biochemists had access to a quantum computer, they could perfectly simulate the properties of new molecules to develop drugs in ways that would take today’s fastest computers decades. A new device takes us closer to providing such a computer. The device successfully traps, detects, and manipulates an ensemble of electrons above the surface of superfluid helium. The system integrates a nanofluidic channel with a superconducting circuit.

Because they are so small, electrons normally interact weakly with electrical signals. The new device, however, gives the electron more time to interact, and it is this setup that makes it possible to build a qubit, the quantum computing equivalent of a bit. Quantum computers could provide the necessary computing power to model extremely large and complex situations in physics, biology, weather systems and many others.

While isolated electrons in a vacuum can store quantum information nearly perfectly, in real materials, the movements of surrounding atoms disturbs them, eventually leading to the loss of information. This work is a step towards realizing isolated, trapped single electrons by taking advantage of the unique relationship existing between electrons and superfluid helium. Electrons will levitate just above the surface of helium, about 10 nanometers away, insensitive to the atomic fluctuations below. While this effect has been known, holding them in a superconducting device structure has not been demonstrated before this work. At the heart of this new technology is a resonator based on circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) architecture, which provides a path to trap electrons above helium and detect the spins of the electrons. Because they are so small, electrons normally interact only very weakly with electrical signals.

Very true POV.

Dry cell biologists, who bridge computer science and cell biology, should have a pivotal role in driving effective team science, says Assaf Zaritsky².

Physicists assert that they have observed quantum spin liquid state again; however, this time, they have done so in a material where it was thought to be impossible. If verified, it could transform how we understand quantum computing.

Back in April, the physics world freaked out when scientists confirmed that they’d made the first direct observation of a brand-new state of matter – known as quantum spin liquid – for the first time.

Continue reading “Physicists Just Observed a Brand-New State of Matter Where We Thought It Was Impossible” »