open access – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Quantum Gravity Breaks Causality — And You Can Compute With It

Dan Breeden — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 01:23:53 +0000

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If you flip a light switch, the light will turn on. A cause and its effect. Simple enough… until quantum gravity come into play. Once you add quantum gravity, lights can turn on and make switches flip. And some physicists think that this could help build better computers. Why does quantum physics make causality so strange? And how can we use quantum gravity to build faster computers? Let’s have a look.

The paper on indefinite causal structures is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0701019

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#science #sciencenews #physics

Compact Disks make Comeback: Memory could Exceed Petabytes

Shailesh Prasad — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 08:07:30 +0000

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Memory storage technology has come a long way from compact disks. Or has it? In a recent paper, scientists report they were able to fit petabytes of memory onto a compact disk using new laser technologies and advanced material design. Is this the future of data storage? Let’s have a look.

#science #sciencenews #technews #tech #technology

First Nuclear Plasma Control with Digital Twin

Shubham Ghosh Roy — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 17:32:24 +0000

Nuclear fusion is a great idea, in principle. In principle, it could solve the energy worries of the world beautifully. The problem is that whenever we’ve tried, getting nuclear fusion to work takes up more energy than it creates. But a team from Japan and the United States just got us a bit closer to our dream of clean energy. They recently succeeded in controlling nuclear plasma in a stellarator by creating a virtual twin. What’s a stellarator, what is digital twin and what did they actually do? Let’s have a look.

The new paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159…

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This New Semiconductor Could Revolutionize Computing

Joseph Barney — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 09:22:48 +0000

Potentially good technology if it makes it to market. A new semiconductor would be great!

Researchers at the Georgia Institute for Technology have found a new semiconductor that’s a really good candidate for making computers faster and smaller than ever. Amazingly enough, it works by combining graphene with silicon carbide, to give a material with a sensible band gap that still has a high thermal conductivity.

Correction to what I say at 02:54 — That should have been voltage, not current.

Paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158…

#technews #sciencenews

Researchers demonstrate field-free switching of a commercial PMA ferromagnet at room temperature

Saúl Morales Rodriguéz — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 18:21:09 +0000

Magnetic random-access memories (MRAMs) are data storage devices that store digital data within nanomagnets, representing it in binary code (i.e., as “0” or “1”). The magnetization of nanomagnets inside these memory devices can be directed upward or downward.

Over the past decade, electronics engineers have introduced techniques that can switch this direction using in-plane electrical currents. These techniques ultimately enabled the creation of a new class of MRAM devices, referred to as spin-orbit torque (SOT)-MRAMs.

While existing techniques to switch magnetization direction of nanomagnets in SOT-MRAMs have proved effective, many only work if external magnetic fields are aligned with the direction of the electric current. In a recent paper published in Nature Electronics, researchers at the National University of Singapore demonstrated the field-free switching of the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) ferromagnet cobalt iron boron (CoFeB) at ambient conditions.

Episode 9: Solo — Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?

Dan Breeden — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 13:29:35 +0000

New Patreon page! https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll.

Blog post: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/08/13/epis…n-nothing/

It’s fun to be in the exciting, chaotic, youthful days of the podcast, when anything goes and experimentation is the order of the day. So today’s show is something different: a solo effort, featuring just me talking without any guests to cramp my style. This won’t be the usual format, but I suspect it will happen from time to time. Feel free to chime in below on how often you think alternative formats should be part of the mix. The topic today is “Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?”, or equivalently “Why Does the Universe Exist at All?” Heady stuff, but we’re not going to back away from the challenge.

What I have to say will roughly follow my recent paper on the subject, although in a more chatty and accessible style. It concerns ideas at the intersection of physics, philosophy, and theology, so tune in if you’re into that sort of thing.

Big news! After a number of people have asked, I have finally opened a Patreon account for people who would like to support Mindscape in some way. You can sign up to kick in a dollar or more per podcast episode, and in return you get 1) access to occasional Ask Me Anything episodes done exclusively for patrons, and 2) my undying gratitude. If the Patreon route is successful enough, I’ll forego having ads on the podcast — we’ll see how it goes.

Google’s New AI Learned To See In The Dark! 🤖

Jeremy Dylan Batterson — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 18:22:47 +0000

GOOGLE’S NEW SENSOR DENOISNG ALGORITHM brings yet another game changer for LOW LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY. Within a handful of years, this will be added to other factors coming down the pipe, giving further impetus to a revolution in night vision. The video below speaks for itself. In effect, the system takes a series of images from different angles, exposures, and so on, then accurately reconstructs what is missing:

Check out Weights & Biases and sign up for a free demo here: https://wandb.com/papers.

The paper “NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images” is available here:
https://bmild.github.io/rawnerf/index.html.

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What If Humanity Is Among The First Spacefaring Civilizations?

Jose Ruben Rodriguez Fuentes — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 23:26:14 +0000

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Half of the universe is filled with expansionist alien civilizations, and it’s only a matter of time before they’ll reach us. OK, that sounded a little sensationalist. But it’s also the conclusion of a recent astrophysics paper. Let’s see how they figure this, and whether we should take it seriously.

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Wow, A Simulation That Looks Like Reality! 🤯

Kelvin Dafiaghor — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 06:24:03 +0000

Check out Lambda here and sign up for their GPU Cloud: https://lambdalabs.com/papers.

My paper “The flow from simulation to reality” with clickable citations is available here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01788-5
Read it for free here! https://rdcu.be/cWPfD

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A 1,000,000,000 Particle Simulation! 🌊

Kelvin Dafiaghor — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 06:24:52 +0000

Check out Weights & Biases and sign up for a free demo here: https://wandb.com/papers.

The paper “A Fast Unsmoothed Aggregation Algebraic Multigrid Framework for the Large-Scale Simulation of Incompressible Flow” is available here:
http://computationalsciences.org/publications/shao-2022-multigrid.html.

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