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Category: mobile phones – Page 6

Quantum in the palm of your hand: The evolution of superconducting qubits

Electrons zipping through transistors, powering the screens on our smartphones. Light zooming from distant stars to Earth, moving faster than anything else in the universe. Protons enabling MRI machines to analyze people’s injuries.

Quantum mechanics explains the behavior of subatomic particles like electrons, photons and protons. In contrast to classical physics that we can observe with our senses, particles in the quantum realm have unusual behaviors. Even though quantum particles make common technologies possible, we don’t experience these behaviors in our everyday world.

That’s why a discovery in 1985 was such a big deal. In a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, a team of three scientists showed that a system you could see could demonstrate quantum behavior. Or as they said in one of the journal articles covering the experiments, the system was “big enough to get one’s grubby fingers on.”

Pulling Graphite Out of Thin Air

Graphite, the carbon center of your humble #2 pencil, is also an essential component in technologies such as batteries, smartphones, laptops, and industrial power equipment. Today, nearly all of this critical mineral has to be mined and processed and, in the United States, imported.

But now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley, and Estonia’s National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics have shown a promising way to convert waste carbon pulled from the air into graphite, opening up a potential alternative to mining. The work was published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers built a custom microscope setup to watch a process known as molten-salt electrolysis, which uses electricity and hot liquid salts to turn carbon dioxide into solid carbon. For the first time, researchers were able to watch the process in real time inside the corrosive, 500-degree-Celsius molten salts while the system was running.

Abstract: 1 Division of Oncology Research and

1 Division of Oncology Research and.

2Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics Program, Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA.

Address correspondence to: Martin E. Fernandez-Zapico, Mayo Clinic, 200 First St. SW, Rochester, Minnesota 55,905, USA. Phone: 1.507.255.0285; Email: [email protected].

Thin films ‘dance’ with substrates that are no longer inert, opening path toward 3D chips

Many of today’s electronic devices—from the semiconductors in your cell phone to the photovoltaic cells in your solar panels—are built on thin-film substrates. The thin film is an electrically conductive material, while the substrate is an inert material. Or is it?

Physicists and materials scientists have long assumed substrates do not react to electrical stimuli, but new research from the University of California San Diego and a team of collaborators has shown that substrates are not inert after all. The discovery has the potential to help engineers build the dense, three-dimensional, brain-inspired computer chips needed for more energy-efficient computing. This work appears in Science.

The research began four years ago in UC San Diego Associate Professor of Physics Alex Frañó’s lab. Frañó is a principal investigator and assistant director at the Quantum Materials for Energy-Efficient Neuromorphic Computing (Q-MEEN-C), one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Centers. One of the goals of Q-MEEN-C is to develop quantum materials that can be used in neuromorphic, or “brain-like,” computing.

Charlie Stross: The World is Complicated. Elegant Narratives Explaining Everything Are Wrong!

Fifteen years ago, I interviewed Charlie Stross about a short story called “Lobsters.”

This spring, a thousand people queued outside Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters to raise one.

June 2011, Singularity 1 on 1. Back then, “singularity” was a word most people filed under astrophysics, not #AI. Charlie’s 2001 story “Lobsters,” which grew into Accelerando, was one of the sharpest early maps of what happens when intelligence stops being exclusively biological. Uploaded minds. Post-scarcity economics. Legal personhood for software. An economy run by optimization processes no human fully follows.

He wrote it six years before the iPhone.

Now look at 2026. OpenClaw, the open source agent built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, now at OpenAI, became the fastest-growing project in GitHub history. In China, installing it is called 养龙虾, “raising lobsters,” after the red logo. Shenzhen, Wuxi and Changshu rushed out subsidy packages. Retirees, schoolkids and office workers lined up for help. A grey market of house-call technicians appeared within days.

Any connection to Charlie’s story? None. The logo is a claw pun on Claude.

Continue reading “Charlie Stross: The World is Complicated. Elegant Narratives Explaining Everything Are Wrong!” | >

Selfmonitoring of fat metabolic status with smartphoneassisted breath acetone detector

S. Hersberger et al. present a smartphone-guided handheld breath acetone detector for self-monitoring of fat metabolism at home. The device combines volume-controlled end-tidal breath sampling with humidity-robust sensor performance and was validated against proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) across 312 human breath samples during exercise and dietary interventions.

Australian scientists unveil first quantum battery that could one day charge devices in seconds

A new development from Australia’s national science agency is offering a glimpse of a future in which charging your phone, laptop, or even grid-scale storage systems could take a fraction of the time it does now.

Researchers in Australia say they have built the world’s first fully functioning proof-of-concept quantum battery.

Scientists from the CSIRO, the University of Melbourne, and RMIT announced that they had successfully developed and tested a quantum battery prototype, Lab Worldwide reported.

Beyond lithium: how sodiumion batteries could change the world

The lithium-ion battery is the beating heart of the modern world. It powers eight billion mobile phones, hundreds of millions of laptops and rapidly growing fleets of electric cars and energy-storage banks. But there’s a new contender breaking into the battery market.

Batteries based on sodium promise to be cheaper, safer and much more environmentally friendly than lithium-ion cells. And this year could mark the start of the sodium era.

In April, Chinese firm CATL — the world’s largest battery producer — announced that it will start mass-producing sodium-ion batteries before the end of 2026. CATL, which is headquartered in Ningde, added that it had signed deals to sell the batteries both to a car manufacturer and to a provider of energy-storage stations for electricity grids.

Meta Files Patent for AI That Can Listen All Day and Track How You’re Feeling

Meta has filed a patent application for an AI that listens to your voice throughout the day, works out how it thinks you are feeling from the way you sound, and keeps a timestamped log of every read.

Each read gets pinned to the moment it happened: the time, your location, what you were doing, even how you were using your phone. Some versions in the filing would listen all day; others would check in only at set times.

None of these ships in a product today, and Meta has not announced one; a filing like this stakes a claim on an idea long before anyone commits to building it.

Apple files lawsuit accusing ChatGPT maker OpenAI of stealing trade secrets

Sam Altman has repeatedly suggested that today’s smartphones are not the ideal interface for advanced AI. The ambition is to create what some observers describe as an “AI-native” device—one that could eventually become as important as the smartphone itself.

Apple on Friday accused OpenAI of stealing trade secrets as it seeks to build its own hardware for ChatGPT, a major rupture in a partnership between the iPhone maker and the artificial intelligence company.

Apple said in the lawsuit filed in a California federal court that OpenAI encouraged Apple employees it was recruiting to share confidential information, even guiding how to avoid scrutiny when taking jobs at the other company.

“This case is about Apple’s former employees stealing Apple’s trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI,” the filing says. “Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it.”

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