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Physicists from MIPT and the Russian Quantum Center have developed a method which is going to make it easier to create a universal quantum computer — they have discovered a way of using multilevel quantum systems (qudits), each one of which is able to work with multiple “conventional” quantum elements — qubits.

Professor Vladimir Man’ko, Scientific Supervisor of MIPT’s Laboratory of Quantum Information Theory and member of staff at the Lebedev Physical Institute, Aleksey Fedorov, a member of staff at the Russian Quantum Center, and his colleague Evgeny Kiktenko published the results of their studies of multilevel quantum systems in a series of papers in Physical Review A, Physics Letters A, and also Quantum Measurements and Quantum Metrology.

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MIT researchers have created an algorithm that hopes to understand human visual social cues and predict what would happen next. Giving AI the ability to understand and predict human social interaction could one day pave the way to efficient home assistant systems as well as intelligent security cameras that can call an ambulance or the police ahead of time.

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created an algorithm that utilizes deep learning, which enables artificial intelligence (AI) to use patterns of human interaction to predict what will happen next. Researchers fed the program with videos featuring human social interactions and tested it to see if it “learned” well enough to be able to predict them.

The researchers’ weapons of choice? 600 hours of Youtube videos and sitcoms, including The Office, Desperate Housewives, and Scrubs. While this lineup may seem questionable, MIT doctoral candidate and project researcher Carl Vondrick reasons out that accessibility and realism were part of the criteria.

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Seagate has just released a trio of storage options, including a 10TB desktop drive, allowing users to get a massive amount of storage.

The natural drive for companies is to provide something bigger than what the competition has to offer. That’s true especially in the storage business, where making drives with higher and higher capacity is the name of the game.

Which is what drove Seagate to make this monumental beast. Say “hello” to 10 TB of hardware storage for your desktop PC. That’s right: a desktop drive with the capacity of an entire server.

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Her computer, Karin Strauss says, contains her “digital attic”—a place where she stores that published math paper she wrote in high school, and computer science schoolwork from college.

She’d like to preserve the stuff “as long as I live, at least,” says Strauss, 37. But computers must be replaced every few years, and each time she must copy the information over, “which is a little bit of a headache.”

It would be much better, she says, if she could store it in DNA—the stuff our genes are made of.

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(A computer simulation of a black hole. NASA, ESA, and D. Coe, J. Anderson, and R. van der Marel (STScI))

In case you haven’t heard, there is a very, very big problem with the universe: About 80% of all of the stuff inside it is missing.

Astronomers call this material “dark matter.” They know it’s out there because its huge mass tugs on and shapes galaxies, but no one has ever detected the material itself. Aside from exerting a gravitational pull, dark matter doesn’t seem to interact with stars, planets, dust, atoms, subatomic particles, or any other “normal” matter as we know it. It’s essentially invisible.

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