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Category: computing – Page 82

Microsoft’s glass data storage system saves terabytes for 10,000 years

Imagine being an explorer, cracking open a 10,000-year-old tomb, uncovering a priceless ancient artifact – and getting rickrolled. Our deep descendants might just get the pleasure, thanks to a Global Music Vault due to be built in Norway, featuring Microsoft’s Project Silica, a tough new data storage medium that’s never gonna give you up.

There’s a common saying that once something is on the internet, it’s there forever, and even if you delete it, it will persist in some server somewhere. But that’s demonstrably untrue – just try to find your cringey old MySpace page. Even the most secure data center is vulnerable to the increasingly common and severe environmental disasters brought on by climate change. Many will lose their data if there’s a long-term power outage, or a large-scale electromagnetic pulse from an attack or, worse still, the Sun. Even in the best-case scenario, physical storage media like Blu-Rays, archival tape, hard drives and even solid state drives will degrade in decades.

To ensure that our history lives on for longer, Microsoft has been experimenting with storing data on glass with what it calls Project Silica. In 2019, the company demonstrated the tech in a partnership with Warner Bros by writing the 1978 movie Superman onto a slide of quartz silica glass and reading it back. The slide, measuring just 75 × 75 mm (3 × 3 in) and 2 mm (0.08 in) thick, could hold as much as 75.6 GB, and remained readable even after being scratched, baked, boiled, microwaved, flooded and demagnetized.

Quantum computer breakthrough tracks qubit fluctuations in real time

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have significantly increased how quickly changes in delicate quantum states can be detected inside a qubit. By combining commercially available hardware with new adaptive measurement techniques, the team can now observe rapid shifts in qubit behavior that were previously impossible to see.

Qubits are the fundamental units of quantum computers, which scientists hope will one day outperform today’s most powerful machines. But qubits are extremely sensitive. The materials used to build them often contain tiny defects that scientists still do not fully understand. These microscopic imperfections can shift position hundreds of times per second. As they move, they alter how quickly a qubit loses energy and with it valuable quantum information.

Until recently, standard testing methods took up to a minute to measure qubit performance. That was far too slow to capture these rapid fluctuations. Instead, researchers could only determine an average energy loss rate, masking the true and often unstable behavior of the qubit.

Guest Post: Quantum And Games — The Shift Developers Can’t Afford to Ignore

This is not about a lack of imagination – it’s about the limitations of classical computing and its inability to handle complexity.

The way in which quantum computing can be used to transform game development, and address the limitations imposed by traditional computing, is often misunderstood. People imagine quantum computers running entire games in real time. This is not how it’s used.

Quantum computing won’t power your frame rate or respond to controller input. Instead it exists to solve certain complex problems far more efficiently than conventional machines. The real opportunity is earlier in the process – helping developers explore ideas, pre-render complex systems and check that complex worlds actually work before players ever see them.

Will probiotics work for you? Models map gut metabolism to predict success

A new study demonstrates that computer models of gut metabolism can predict which probiotics will successfully establish themselves in a person’s gut and how different prebiotics affect production of health-promoting short-chain fatty acids. The findings are published in PLOS Biology by Sean Gibbons of the Institute for Systems Biology, US, and colleagues.

Probiotic and prebiotic supplements show highly variable results across individuals, making it difficult to predict who will benefit from these interventions. This variability comes from complex interactions between introduced probiotics, each person’s existing gut microbiota, and their diet.

In the new work, researchers first tested a metabolic model on data from two previous studies in which participants diagnosed with type 2 diabetes were given a placebo or probiotic/prebiotic mixture designed to improve glucose control and healthy participants were given a placebo or a probiotic treatment designed to treat recurrent Clostridioides difficile infections, respectively.

New chip-fabrication method creates ‘twin’ fingerprints for direct authentication

Just like each person has unique fingerprints, every CMOS chip has a distinctive “fingerprint” caused by tiny, random manufacturing variations. Engineers can leverage this unforgeable ID for authentication, to safeguard a device from attackers trying to steal private data.

But these cryptographic schemes typically require secret information about a chip’s fingerprint to be stored on a third-party server. This creates security vulnerabilities and requires additional memory and computation.

To overcome this limitation, MIT engineers developed a manufacturing method that enables secure, fingerprint-based authentication, without the need to store secret information outside the chip.

Neutron scattering helps clarify magnetic behavior in altermagnetic material

Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have identified the true source of a magnetic effect seen in the material ruthenium dioxide (RuO₂), helping resolve an active debate in the rapidly growing field of altermagnetism. The study is published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

RuO₂ has drawn global attention as a possible “altermagnetic” material, a newly predicted class of materials that could enable faster, more energy-efficient computing technologies. The excitement has been fueled by theory and early experimental reports suggesting that RuO₂ might host an unusual magnetic state with major implications for spintronics and high-speed electronics.

“Altermagnets are a hot field of research right now,” said Steven Bennett, Ph.D., an NRL materials scientist and co-author of the study. “There’s been a rush to experimentally demonstrate what theorists predicted, because the impact on high-speed, energy-efficient computing could be significant.”

Convergence of aging- and rejuvenation-related epigenetic alterations on PRC2 targets

Rejuvenation of tissues in physiologically aging mice can be accomplished by long-term partial reprogramming via expression of reprogramming factors (Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc). To investigate the epigenetic determinants of partial reprogramming-mediated rejuvenation, we used whole-genome bisulfite sequencing to carry out unbiased comprehensive profiling of DNA methylation changes in skin from mice subjected to partial reprogramming, as well as young and untreated old controls. We found a striking convergence of age- and rejuvenation-related epigenetic alterations on targets of the Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2), with increased DNA methylation level and entropy over these regions. Native ChIP demonstrated extensive loss of H3K27me3 in aged epidermis compared to young, partially overlapping regions with age- and rejuvenation-related DNA methylation changes. In addition, large H3K9me2-marked “LOCK” heterochromatin domains defined the boundaries for hypomethylated highly entropic regions during aging. These results are also supported by a likewise prominent enrichment of PRC2 targets in gene expression data, suggesting that PRC2 activity can modulate aging and mediate tissue rejuvenation.

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