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Researchers have developed a new method using the Allen Telescope Array to search for interplanetary radio communication in the TRAPPIST-1 star system.

A new technique allows astronomers to home in on planets beyond our solar system that are in line with each other and with Earth to search for radio signals similar, for example, to ones used to communicate with the rovers on Mars. Penn State astronomers and scientists at the SETI Institute spent 28 hours scanning the TRAPPIST-1 star system for these signs of alien technology with the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). This project marks the longest single-target search for radio signals from TRAPPIST-1. Although the team didn’t find any evidence of extraterrestrial technology, their work introduced a new way to search for signals in the future.

A paper describing the research was accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal and is available online as a preprint.

The lightbulb illuminated our world, the airplane connected it, and the iPhone put it in our pockets. Here’s the case for tech-optimism.

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Discover the latest AI devices for smarter living. Explore our range now for innovative solutions that redefine convenience and efficiency.

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The SPINNING project, under the leadership of the Fraunhofer Institute, is pioneering a quantum computer using diamond-based spin photons, promising lower cooling requirements, longer operating times, and lower error rates compared to conventional quantum systems.

This innovative approach leverages the unique properties of diamonds to create stable qubits, aiming for high scalability and fidelity in quantum computing. Recent achievements include the successful demonstration of qubit entanglement over long distances, significantly outperforming traditional quantum computers in error rate and coherence time.

The SPINNING project: innovating with diamond-based technology.

Hot AI trend consists of large behavior models (LBM), which is a combination of generative AI LLMs with behavior-oriented AI walk and talk features. Here’s the scoop.

Google Cloud recently announced a major upgrade to its AI infrastructure, introducing new hardware and software solutions designed to meet the growing demands of artificial intelligence workloads. The centerpiece of these changes is the release of Trillium, Google’s sixth-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).

Compared to its predecessor, the TPU v5e, Trillium delivers over four times the training performance and up to three times the inference throughput. This improvement is accompanied by a 67% increase in energy efficiency.

The new TPU boasts impressive specifications, including double the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) capacity and Interchip Interconnect (ICI) bandwidth, making Trillium particularly well-suited for handling large language models like Gemma 2 and Llama, as well as compute-intensive inference tasks such as those required by diffusion models like Stable Diffusion XL.

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere in Europe.

While some are worried about its long-term impact, a team of researchers at the University of Technology in Vienna is working on responsible ways to use AI.

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A group of scientists from Skoltech, led by Skoltech Vice President for Photonics Pavlos Lagoudakis, a laureate of the Vyzov (Challenge) prize, shared new results of the polariton condensate research. The team demonstrated that under optical excitation a polariton condensate can simultaneously occupy two closely spaced energy levels, which results in the formation of quantized vortex clusters. The outcomes of the study are prominent for optical tweezers, increasing the width of the data transmission channel in optical communication lines, and in other research areas. The paper was published in the Applied Physics Letters journal. It was featured on the cover of the weekly issue.

The new study is based on the previous work on optical vortices — optical beams that have their phase twisted in a spiral around the propagation axis. In 2022, Skoltech researchers, together with their colleagues from the University of Iceland and the University of Southampton, were the first to show how a cluster of quantized vortices with periodically flipping charges is formed in polariton condensates. The authors experimentally observed a cluster of four vortices and detected periodic flips of the signs of their charges with an interval of one fifth of a nanosecond.

“Polaritons are quasi-particles consisting of light and matter. They can form a macroscopic coherent state — Bose-Einstein condensate. This state behaves, roughly speaking, like one particle and is described by a single wave function. But the condensation of polaritons in inorganic microresonators is achieved not at room temperature, but at extremely low ones, therefore, to observe the condensation of polaritons, we place the sample in which they appear in a cryostat, where it is cooled to four degrees Kelvin,” says Kirill Sitnik, the first author of the study, a junior research scientist at the Skoltech Photonics Center’s Laboratory of Hybrid Photonics.