Alex Bocharov explains why the company is hoping to build qubits out of particles that some scientists think might not even exist.
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Category: computing – Page 764
The idea of storing digital data in DNA seems like science fiction. At first glance, it might not seem obvious that a molecule can store data. The term “data storage” conjures up images of physical artifacts like CDs and data centers, not a microscopic molecule like DNA. But there are a number of reasons why DNA is an exciting option for information storage.
The status quo
We’re in the midst of a data explosion. We create vast amounts of information via our estimated 17 billion internet-connected devices: smartphones, cars, health trackers, and all other devices. As we continue to add sensors and network connectivity to physical devices we will produce more and more data. Similarly, as we bring online the 4.2 billion people who are currently offline, we will produce more and more data.
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An entirely new type of computer that blends optical and electrical processing could get around this impending processing constraint and solve superlarge optimization problems. If it can be scaled up, this non-traditional computer could save costs by finding more optimal solutions to problems that have an incredibly high number of possible solutions.
There is a special type of problem – called a combinatorial optimization problem – that traditional computers find difficult to solve, even approximately. An example is what’s known as the “traveling salesman” problem, wherein a salesman has to visit a specific set of cities, each only once, and return to the first city, and the salesman wants to take the most efficient route possible. This problem may seem simple but the number of possible routes increases extremely rapidly as cities are added, and this underlies why the problem is difficult to solve.
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4DS has demonstrated Interface Switching ReRAM cells at a 40 nanometer geometry, representing significant progress in scalability and yield.
This 40nm geometry, demonstrated by 4DS, is smaller than the latest generation of 3D Flash — the most dominant non-volatile memory technology used in billions of mobile devices, cloud servers and data centers.
In 2016, 4DS has:
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Earlier this year, a team from Queen’s University in Canada demonstrated a smartphone prototype called ReFlex that had a flexible display capable of flipping virtual book pages in response to what were dubbed bend gestures. Researchers from the same Human Media Lab have now developed a similar device called the WhammyPhone that’s claimed to be the world’s first virtual musical instrument for flexible phones.
The WhammyPhone prototype sports a 1920 × 1080 pixel full high-definition Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diode (FOLED) touchscreen display and, like the ReFlex device, includes a bend sensor. This means that a user can manipulate the sound of electronically-generated instruments such as a guitar or violin by bending, squeezing or twisting the “smartphone.”
“WhammyPhone is a completely new way of interacting with sound using a smartphone,” said Dr. Roel Vertegaal, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Queen’s University. “It allows for the kind of expressive input normally only seen in traditional musical instruments.”
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Athletes with disabilities have been competing in a range of challenges that use assistive technology to overcome day-to-day practical challenges.
Bionic arms, powered exoskeletons, brain-controlled computer interfaces and supercharged wheelchairs all featured at the world’s first Cybathlon, near Zurich, Switzerland.
One of the races saw functional electrical stimulation (FES) used to activate the leg muscles of paralysed competitors to ride bikes.
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It seems that biofeedback is a thing of future. By having brain activity feedback, you can train meditation, attention, improve sleep, control gadgets, artificial limbs, carts for impaired, and even computer I/O. Everything starts with proper biosensor and controller. Biological signals are very low voltage – microvolts. In order to distinguish them from noisy environment, a precision electronics is required. Brain activity signals are somewhat different from myograms or ECG, they can be analyzed as power spectrum that represent brain activity phases like Alpha, Beta, Theta. There has be a numerous modules developed to acquire brain signals. If you want low to develop sensors by yourself, you could grab a Neurosky platform which is a small size PCB with sensor and microcontroller interfaces.
With it you can read raw EEG signals with sampling 512Hz and do with them what you want. USART interface enables you to connect it yo Arduino or Raspberry Pi where you can calculate all sort of things and extract control signals. Of course you can read processed power spectrum as well to detect activities like attention, meditation and other activities. Eye blink detection is also an option. Great thing is that you can use this module to read ECG activity as well. Module incorporates AC noise filter which can be configured for 50HZ or 60Hz.
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In a development beneficial for both industry and environment, UC Santa Barbara researchers have created a high-quality coating for organic electronics that promises to decrease processing time as well as energy requirements.
“It’s faster, and it’s nontoxic,” said Kollbe Ahn, a research faculty member at UCSB’s Marine Science Institute and corresponding author of a paper published in Nano Letters (“Molecularly Smooth Self-Assembled Monolayer for High-Mobility Organic Field-Effect Transistors”).
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Nice.
Scientists in Australia have developed a quantum bit that’s 10 times more stable than existing technologies, and the new record could vastly expand the kinds of calculations quantum computers can perform.
Whereas conventional computers process information recorded in binary bits that either take a 0 or 1 value, quantum computers use quantum bits – also called qubits – that can occupy 0, 1, or a superposition that can be both at the same time.
Great advancement around how to make QC available on small scale devices.
Researchers from the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo led the development of a new extensible wiring technique capable of controlling superconducting quantum bits, representing a significant step towards to the realization of a scalable quantum computer.
“The quantum socket is a wiring method that uses three-dimensional wires based on spring-loaded pins to address individual qubits,” said Jeremy Béjanin, a PhD candidate with IQC and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Waterloo. He and Thomas McConkey, PhD candidate from IQC and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Waterloo, are lead authors on the study that appears in the journal Physical Review Applied as an Editors’ Suggestion and is featured in Physics. “The technique connects classical electronics with quantum circuits, and is extendable far beyond current limits, from one to possibly a few thousand qubits.”
One promising implementation of a scalable quantum computing architecture uses a superconducting qubit, which is similar to the electronic circuits currently found in a classical computer, and is characterized by two states, 0 and 1. Quantum mechanics makes it possible to prepare the qubit in superposition states, meaning that the qubit can be in states 0 and 1 at the same time. To initialize the qubit in the 0 state, superconducting qubits are brought down to temperatures close to −273 degrees Celsius inside a cryostat, or dilution refrigerator.