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Category: engineering – Page 238

A University of Oklahoma-led team of physicists believes chip-based atomic physics holds promise to make the second quantum revolution—the engineering of quantum matter with arbitrary precision—a reality. With recent technological advances in fabrication and trapping, hybrid quantum systems are emerging as ideal platforms for a diverse range of studies in quantum control, quantum simulation and computing.

James P. Shaffer, professor in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, OU College of Arts and Sciences; Jon Sedlacek, OU graduate student; and a team from the University of Nevada, Western Washington University, The United States Naval Academy, Sandia National Laboratories and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have published research important for integrating Rydberg atoms into hybrid quantum systems and the fundamental study of atom– interactions, as well as applications for electrons bound to a 2D surface.

“A convenient surface for application in hybrid quantum systems is quartz because of its extensive use in the semiconductor and optics industries,” Sedlacek said. “The surface has been the subject of recent interest as a result of it stability and low surface energy. Mitigating electric fields near ‘trapping’ surfaces is the holy grail for realizing hybrid ,” added Hossein Sadeghpour, director of the Institute for Theoretical Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

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Awesome!

Even the simplest networks of neurons in the brain are composed of millions of connections, and examining these vast networks is critical to understanding how the brain works. An international team of researchers, led by R. Clay Reid, Wei Chung Allen Lee and Vincent Bonin from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Harvard Medical School and Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF), respectively, has published the largest network to date of connections between neurons in the cortex, where high-level processing occurs, and have revealed several crucial elements of how networks in the brain are organized. The results are published in the journal Nature.

“This is a culmination of a research program that began almost ten years ago. Brain networks are too large and complex to understand piecemeal, so we used high-throughput techniques to collect huge data sets of brain activity and brain wiring,” says R. Clay Reid, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “But we are finding that the effort is absolutely worthwhile and that we are learning a tremendous amount about the structure of networks in the brain, and ultimately how the brain’s structure is linked to its function.”

“Although this study is a landmark moment in a substantial chapter of work, it is just the beginning,” says Wei-Chung Lee, Ph.D., Instructor in Neurobiology at Harvard Medicine School and lead author on the paper. “We now have the tools to embark on reverse engineering the brain by discovering relationships between circuit wiring and neuronal and network computations.”

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Now, we’re hitting Terminator mode with this.

If you’re worried that artificial intelligence will take over the world now that computers are powerful enough to outsmart humans at incredibly complex games, then you’re not going to like the idea that someday computers will be able to simply build their own chips without any help from humans. That’s not the case just yet, but researchers did come up with a way to grow metal wires at a molecular level.

At the same time, this is a remarkable innovation that paves the way for a future where computers are able to create high-end chip solutions just as a plant would grow leaves, rather than having humans develop computer chips using complicated nanoengineering techniques.

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Researchers from IBM’s T.J. Watson Researcher Center are working to create wires that would simply assemble themselves in chips. The scientists use a flat substrate loaded with particles that encourage growth, and then add the materials they wish to grow the wire from.

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ARPA-E creating sustainable energy crops for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass.

In Washington, the DOE’s ARPA-E TERRA projects seek to accelerate the development of sustainable energy crops for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass. To accomplish this, the projects uniquely integrate agriculture, information technology, and engineering communities to design and apply new tools for the development of improved varieties of energy sorghum. The TERRA project teams will create novel platforms to enhance methods for crop phenotyping (identifying and measuring the physical characteristics of plants) which are currently time-intensive and imprecise.

The new approaches will include automated methods for observing and recording characteristics of plants and advanced algorithms for analyzing data and predicting plant growth potential. The projects will also produce a large public database of sorghum genotypes, enabling the greater community of plant physiologists,

Bioinformaticians and geneticists to generate breakthroughs beyond TERRA. These innovations will accelerate the annual yield gains of traditional plant breeding and support the discovery of new crop traits that improve water productivity and nutrient use efficiency needed to improve the sustainability of bioenergy crops.

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Could a cheap molecule used to disinfect swimming pools provide the key to creating a new form of DNA nanomaterials?

Cyanuric acid is commonly used to stabilize chlorine in backyard pools; it binds to free chlorine and releases it slowly in the water. But researchers at McGill University have now discovered that this same small, inexpensive molecule can also be used to coax DNA into forming a brand new structure: instead of forming the familiar double helix, DNA’s nucleobases — which normally form rungs in the DNA ladder — associate with cyanuric acid molecules to form a triple helix.

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I do believe we’re within a 7 to 8 yr window at this point with Quantum hitting the broader main stream computing infrastructure. However, we have banks in Europe that have been using the technology for network communications, Los Alamos Labs experimenting since late 2011 with Quantum Internet, now China is launching their own Quantum Satellite for wireless communications; so I do suggest a strategy needs to be developed over the next 2 to 3 yrs for government & industry around how to manage & plan for deployment of Quantum especially with China & Russia’s interest.

New research demonstrating that quantum computing is now just an engineering challenge moves the possibility of encryption-cracking machines to the front burner.

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Allen Institute working with Baylor on reconstructing neuronal connections.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has awarded an $18.7 million contract to the Allen Institute for Brain Science, as part of a larger project with Baylor College of Medicine and Princeton University, to create the largest ever roadmap to understand how the function of networks in the brain’s cortex relates to the underlying connections of its individual neurons.

The project is part of the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program, which seeks to revolutionize machine learning by reverse-engineering the algorithms of the brain.

“This effort will be the first time that we can physically look at more than a thousand connections between neurons in a single cortical network and understand how those connections might allow the network to perform functions, like process visual information or store memories,” says R. Clay Reid, Ph.D., Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Principal Investigator on the project.

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VideoDisclaimer: The author of this article, Jason Belzer, is a member of rLoop and serves as the non-profit’s legal counsel. When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk proposed the Hyperloop — a futuristic transportation system capable of propelling passengers to supersonic speeds — back in 2013, it is unlikely that even he could have imagined that just a few years later his vision would be tantalizing close to reality. Yet ironically, Musk, who has helped build companies like Tesla Motors and SpaceX that are on the leading edge of technological innovation, will not receive the credit if the Hyperloop indeed becomes a reality. Instead, that honor will be bestowed upon on a small group of teams now working feverishly to construct a prototype that will be tested this summer at SpaceX headquarters in California.

Imagine tackling one of the most complex engineering projects in the history of the human race, requiring countless hours of collaboration and experimentation by some of the world’s most talented engineers, and never actually meeting the people you are working with in a physical setting. You might think it’s impossible, or you might be a member of rLoop — the only non student team to reach the final stage of the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.

rLoop V6 3AM.259 - Final

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This looks very promising.

The human body is designed pretty well: Our muscles are able to switch between strength and dexterity, limbs stiffening when we do an energy-fueled task like lifting a bowling ball and softening when we do something delicate like painting with a brush. This ability is very rarely replicated in engineering systems, namely because it’s expensive, but also because it’s been damn hard to clone.

However, HRL Laboratories — the same Malibu-based researchers who brought you microlattice — has announced they’ve been able to replicate the reactions of human muscle in metal. Their goal is to use this new technology to create cars with smoother rides and, more intriguingly, more human-like robots.

In a paper published in the most recent issue of Science Advances, the researchers claim that their technology, “variable stiffness vibration isolator” can change from stiff to soft by a factor of 100 in milliseconds, independent of how much mechanical force is applied. This technology, they argue, far surpasses any previous mechanisms trying to do the same thing.

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