Lifeboat Foundation

Google to run Chrome Canary experimentally for the next two years to address post-quantum cryptography.

Alphabet’s forthcoming Chrome Canary browser is just the “canary” in the coalmine—quantum computing is coming faster than you might think.

As far as the whole mind-to-computer thing I totally agree.

The name of the game, for me at least, when it comes to this type of thing is continuity of consciousness. Without that you are nothing more than a copy of another person, not the person themselves. That said, if there were to be a very, very slow process where your natural neurons are replaced by artificial ones, with both types working together seamlessly, THEN I’d be first in line.

The future looks bright, except when it doesn’t. Here are 10 exceptionally regrettable developments we can expect in the coming decades.

Continue reading “10 Predictions About the Future That Should Scare the Hell Out of You” »

The universal quantum gate to enable long distance communications with QC without degradation.

Scientists have now developed a universal quantum gate, which could become the key component in a quantum computer.

Light particles completely ignore each other. In order that these particles can nevertheless switch each other when processing quantum information, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have now developed a universal quantum gate. Quantum gates are essential elements of a quantum computer. Switching them with photons, i.e. light particles, would have practical advantages over operating them with other carriers of quantum information.

Continue reading “Researchers Develop A Universal Quantum Gate” »

US AF does need to get onboard quickly or be left in the dust.

Quantum computing could be a competitive advantage for the U.S. military, and the Air Force Research Lab wants to keep pace.

At the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and Tufts University a team has developed a microfluidic chip that mimics human tissue for use in drug testing applications. The chip is based on a silk gel that overcomes the limitations of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a silicon material widely used to host living cells within microfluidic devices. As an example, PDMS has problems handling lipids, absorbing them instead of letting them move freely along with other nearby compounds and so not applicable with lipid-based compounds. Additionally, PDMS is not biodegradable and so a small device based on it can’t easily be used as an implantable. Silk, on the other hand, just needed a bit of engineering to make a candidate that overcomes many of PDMS’s limitations.

Good; and as I had hope it could be done for many years.

Recalling a favorite song could be enough to unlock computers one day. All you’ll need is a tiny earbud to register the electro-brainwaves, researchers say.

Yale researchers have devised a method that brings marketable Li-O₂ batteries closer to reality, improving both the batteries’ performance and the ability to study them.

In recent years, lithium-oxygen batteries have intrigued researchers with their potential. They can store at least two to three times the energy as lithium-ion batteries can, which are the current standard for consumer electronics, so laptops could theoretically run longer on a single charge and electric cars would drive farther.

But they’re not quite there yet. For now, Li-O₂ batteries operate sluggishly and have short lives. Compounding matters, it’s hard to get a sense of how to fix that because figuring out the exact nature of their chemistry has proved tricky.

Continue reading “A New Design Strategy for Better Lithium Oxygen Batteries” »

Micron sized onchip making printing and communication faster.

Researchers designed subwavelength micro-disk lasers (MDLs) as small as 1μm in diameter on exact (001) silicon, using colloidal lithography (dispersing silica colloidal beads as hard masks before etching the prepared QD material layers). Micron sized lasers are 1,000 times shorter in length, and 1 million times smaller than current onchip lasers.

A group of scientists from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; the University of California, Santa Barbara; Sandia National Laboratories and Harvard University were able to fabricate tiny lasers directly on silicon — a huge breakthrough for the semiconductor industry and well beyond.

Continue reading “Micron sized onchip quantum dot lasers will enable faster communication and computing” »

Graphene, a two-dimensional wonder-material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms linked in a hexagonal chicken-wire pattern, has attracted intense interest for its phenomenal ability to conduct electricity. Now University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have used rod-shaped bacteria — precisely aligned in an electric field, then vacuum-shrunk under a graphene sheet — to introduce nanoscale ripples in the material, causing it to conduct electrons differently in perpendicular directions.

The resulting material, sort of a graphene nano-corduroy, can be applied to a silicon chip and may add to graphene’s almost limitless potential in electronics and nanotechnology. The finding is reported in the journal ACS Nano.

“The current across the graphene wrinkles is less than the current along them,” says Vikas Berry, associate professor and interim head of chemical engineering at UIC, who led the research.