Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists at the University of California, Irvine and elsewhere have fabricated new two-dimensional quantum materials with breakthrough electrical and magnetic attributes that could make them building blocks of future quantum computers and other advanced electronics.

In three separate studies appearing this month in Nature, Science Advances and Nature Materials, UCI researchers and colleagues from UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Princeton University, Fudan University and the University of Maryland explored the physics behind the 2-D states of novel materials and determined they could push computers to new heights of speed and power.

The common threads running through the papers are that the research is conducted at extremely cold temperatures and that the signal carriers in all three studies are not electrons — as with traditional silicon-based technologies — but Dirac or Majorana fermions, particles without mass that move at nearly the speed of light.

Robots may soon be more sensitive than humans—at least when it comes to their skin. Researchers from Glasgow University have developed a type of artificial skin that is more sensitive than our own. Just add this to all the ways robots are taking over the world.

Related: A Robot Performed Soft-Tissue Surgery By Itself

We try to separate the facts from fiction about the controversial cholesterol-buster

ByMirror.co.uk

This object, V838 Monocerotis, looks like it moved faster than the speed of light. We know what you’re going to say–nothing moves faster than light. Well, we didn’t say it did move faster…just that it looks like it did.

Full story at YouTube.

Orchard owners say they need automation because seasonal farm labor is getting harder to come by.

I came up with a neat idea for a multiplication grid visual the other day, and stuck it up on Twitter where it has been doing the rounds with unprecedented alacrity:

I’ve loved reading comments and seeing how people are using the grids already, with fellow teachers, students and your own kids (I’m making one on A1 squared paper for my son this weekend – here’s one 3-year-old who will know what multiplication means before he learns his tables, if I can manage it!) A few of you came up with ideas for variations I could do, including starting the grid from the bottom-left to mimic a Cartesian coordinate grid, and emphasizing square numbers. I’ve also done one with the prime factorization of numbers on one side of the diagonal, which I quite like. I’ve put all the images together into a single pdf document to make it easier to access. It’s on my website at www.thechalkface.net/resources/true_scale_multiplication_grid.pdf:

Continue reading “The True Scale Multiplication Grid” »

SAN FRANCISCO A U.S. judge on Wednesday said he had not seen clear evidence that Uber Technologies Inc had conspired with an engineer on its self driving car program to steal trade secrets from Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Waymo, and that he was wrestling with whether to issue an injunction against the ride service.

At a hearing in San Francisco federal court, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said it was undisputed that the engineer, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded about 14,000 documents shortly before he stopped working for Waymo.

If it were proven that Levandowski and Uber conspired in taking Waymo’s information, that could have dire consequences for Uber, say legal and ride-hailing industry experts.

Continue reading “Waymo has ‘no smoking gun’ in Uber self driving car case: U.S. judge” »

One of the greatest ethical debates in science — manipulating the fundamental building blocks of life — is set to heat up once more.

According to scientists behind an ambitious and controversial plan to write the human genome from the ground up, synthesising DNA and incorporating it into mammalian and even human cells could be as little as four to five years away.

Nearly 200 leading researchers in genetics and bioengineering are expected to attend a meeting in New York City next week, to discuss the next stages of what is now called the Genome Project-write (GP-write) plan: a US$100 million venture to research, engineer, and test living systems of model organisms, including the human genome.

Continue reading “Tensions Flare as Scientists Go Public With Plan to Build Synthetic Human DNA” »