Lifeboat Foundation

A secure quantum internet is one step closer thanks to a quantum memory made from a crystal, which could form a crucial part of a device able to transmit entangled photons over a distance of 5 kilometres. Crucially, it is entirely compatible with existing communication networks, making it suitable for real-world use.

There has long been a vision of a quantum version of the internet, which would allow quantum computers to communicate across long distances by exchanging particles of light called photons that have been linked together with quantum entanglement, allowing them to transmit quantum states.

The problem is that photons get lost when they are transmitted through long lengths of fibre-optic cable. For normal photons, this isn’t an issue, because networking equipment can simply measure and retransmit them after a certain distance, which is how normal fibre data connections work. But for entangled photons, any attempt to measure or amplify them changes their state.

Researchers at Oxford University have developed an AI-enabled system that can comprehensively identify people in videos by conducting detective-like, multi-domain investigations as to who they might be, from context, and from a variety of publicly available secondary sources, including the matching of audio sources with visual material from the internet.

Though the research centers on the identification of public figures, such as people appearing in television programs and films, the principle of inferring identity from context is theoretically applicable to anyone whose face, voice, or name appears in online sources.

Indeed, the paper’s own definition of fame is not limited to show business workers, with the researchers declaring ‘We denote people with many images of themselves online as famous‘.

COVID 19 pandemic, automation and 6G could end the metropolitan era from building high sky scrapers for companies. Companies can operate like a network from home to home without going to office. This will help a lot to bring down Urban Heat Islands and make our cities more efficient in transportation and communication to send the data even faster.

Tom Marzetta is the director of NYU Wireless, New York University’s research center for cutting-edge wireless technologies. Prior to joining NYU Wireless, Marzetta was at Nokia Bell Labs, where he developed massive MIMO. Massive MIMO (short for “multiple-input multiple-output”) allows engineers to pack dozens of small antennas into a single array. The high number of antennas means more signals can be sent and received at once, dramatically boosting a single cell tower’s efficiency.

Massive MIMO is becoming an integral part of 5G, as is an independent development that came out of NYU Wireless by the center’s founding director Ted Rappaport: Millimeter waves. And now the professors and students at NYU Wireless are already looking ahead to 6G and beyond.

Continue reading “Heres What 6G Will Be, According to the Creator of Massive MIMO” »

Two novel demonstrations bring the backbone of the quantum internet, quantum repeaters, a little closer.

Researchers at Purdue University, Indiana, have developed a method to transform ordinary clothes into battery-free wearables that are waterproof and resistant to laundry. These smart fabrics can be powered wirelessly through a flexible, silk-based coil sewn on the textile.

Early Tuesday morning, large portions of the web sputtered out for about an hour. The downed sites shared no obvious theme or geography; the outages were global, and they hit everything from Reddit to Spotify to The New York Times. (And yes, also WIRED.) In fact, the only thing they have in common is Fastly, a content-delivery network (CDN) provider whose predawn hiccup reverberated across the internet.

You may not have heard of Fastly, but you likely interact with it in some fashion every time you go online. Along with Cloudflare and Akamai, it’s one of the biggest CDN providers in the world. And while Fastly has been vague about what specific glitch caused Tuesday’s worldwide disruptions, the incident offers a stark reminder of how fragile and interconnected internet infrastructure can be, especially when so much of it hinges on a handful of companies that operate largely outside of public awareness.

Hundreds of websites worldwide crashed this morning following a massive internet outage – with the UK government, Amazon and Spotify among those experiencing issues.

Millions of users across the globe reported problems trying to access web pages, with Netflix, Twitch and news websites including the BBC, Guardian, CNN and the New York Times hit by the problem.

Continue reading “Hundreds of websites worldwide go DOWN including Netflix and Spotify” »

Increased account terminations would punish “innocent” users, groups tell court.

Don’t worry you haven’t stumbled onto that strange part of the internet again, but it is true that we never truly did sequence the entire Human genome. For you see what was completed in June 2000 was the so called ‘first draft’, which constituted roughly 92% of genome. The problem with the remaining 8% was that these were genomic ‘dead zones’, made up of vast regions of repeating patterns of nucleotide bases that made studying these regions of the genome effectively impossible with the technology that was available at the time.

However, recent breakthroughs in high throughput nanopore sequencing technology have allowed for these so call dead zones to be sequences. Analysing these zone revealed 80 different genes which had been missed during the initial draft of the Human genome. Admittedly this is not many considering that the other 92% of the genome contain 19889 genes, but it may turn out that these genes hold great significance, as there are still many biological pathways which we do not fully understand. It is likely that many of these genes will soon be linked with what are known as orphan enzymes, which are proteins that are created from an unidentified gene, which is turn opens up the door to studying these enzymes more closely via controlling their expression.

Continue reading “Genes in the Dead Zone” »