Lifeboat Foundation

“ALL ABOARD” the QC train is leaving the station.

If you’ve ever had a train set, you might remember the tiny street lamps that are often part of the model landscape. Today, the bulbs from those toy lamps are helping to shed light on quantum computing.

In fact, there’s been a spate of developments lately in quantum computing, and not just IBM’s announcement of its upcoming cloud service. Here are three recent advances from research institutions around the world.

Continue reading “How toy street lamps are shedding new light on quantum computing” »

NEW YORK: A team of US researchers has come up with a rough map of part of the brain that controls vision and leaves things out even when they are plainly in sight.

The frontal cortex is often seen as our “thinking cap,” associated with thinking and making decisions. But it’s not commonly connected with vision.

At a time when the global technology giants are set to leverage the benefits of AI for your daily lives, India seems to be reluctant to get on to this bus.

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Scientists have devised a way to build a “quantum metamaterial” — an engineered material with exotic properties not found in nature — using ultracold atoms trapped in an artificial crystal composed of light. The theoretical work represents a step toward manipulating atoms to transmit information, perform complex simulations or function as powerful sensors.

The research team, led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley, proposes the use of an accordion-like atomic framework, or “lattice” structure, made with laser light to trap atoms in regularly spaced nanoscale pockets. Such a light-based structure, which has patterned features that in some ways resemble those of a crystal, is essentially a “perfect” structure — free of the typical defects found in natural materials.

Researchers believe they can pinpoint the placement of a so-called “probe” atom in this crystal of light, and actively tune its behavior with another type of laser light (near-infrared light) to make the atom cough up some of its energy on demand in the form of a particle of light, or photon.

Nice list of experts on Quantum; however, I would love to see someone from the Lab from Los Alamos to discuss Quantum Internet and University of Sydney from their Innovation Lab or the lady herself “Michelle Simmons” on the panel. Hope to see registration soon.

The announcement was made at the Global Derivatives Trading & Risk Management conference in Budapest, Hungary.

“Quantum computers enable us to use the laws of physics to solve intractable mathematical problems,” said Marcos de López de Prado, Senior Managing Director at Guggenheim Partners and a Research Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division. “This is the beginning of a new era, and it will change the job of the mathematician and computer scientist in the years to come.”

Continue reading “D-Wave launches Quantum for Quants at Budapest derivatives conference” »

A strange new behavior of water molecules has been observed inside crystals of beryl, a type of emerald, caused by bizarre quantum-mechanical effects that let the water molecules face six different directions at the same time.

Under normal conditions, the two hydrogen atoms in each water molecule are arranged around the oxygen atom in an open “V” shape, sometimes compared to a boomerang or Mickey Mouse ears.

Continue reading “New State of Water: Strange 6-Sided Molecule Found” »

Last September, researchers detected an exceptionally weak signal that lasted for about a tenth of a second: the gentle chirp of a gravitational wave. This feat, which confirmed a prediction made by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, is worthy of the Nobel prize.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jf7D8snlsnQ

IBM Research has announced that effective Wednesday May 4, it is making quantum computing available free to members of the public, who can access and run experiments on IBM’s quantum processor, via the IBM Cloud, from any desktop or mobile device.

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University of Cambridge researchers have developed the world’s tiniest engine, capable of a force per unit-weight nearly 100 times higher than any motor or muscle.

The new nano-engines could lead to nanorobots small enough to enter living cells to fight disease, the researchers say.

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Absolutely beautiful animation.

Where do I sign up to be ON one of those?! wink

I want to know more about the world in this short animation Entropy, by Tim Cahn. I want to know why the spaceship is leaving Earth. I want to know what the space station is doing all the way out there. I want to know who’s there. I want to know where the ship is headed. I want to live in this world. But in the stillness of the short, we only get to see the beautiful imagery of a spaceship leaving Earth, so we have to fill in the blanks ourselves.

Continue reading “Gorgeous Animation Shows a Spaceship Mysteriously Traveling to a Universe Beyond” »