Lifeboat Foundation

Experts at the National Eye Institute, Maryland, found showing sufferers changing patterns of black lines triggered damaged cells in the optic nerves to grow back, which could potentially restore sight.

“When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent it.”

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“As the long-running Cassini mission enters its last year at Saturn, NASA is moving forward with an early-stage technology study to send a drone to its moon Titan.”

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Pokémon GO on HoloLens. Yes please.

Researchers have developed a computer algorithm that doesn’t solve problems but instead creates them for the purpose of evaluating quantum computers.

The desire for quantum computers stems from their potential to solve certain hard problems faster than classical computers. But those bragging rights haven’t actually been earned yet, as no experiment has shown this presumed speedup. Researchers from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, have devised an algorithm that generates extra hard problems that could offer quantum computers the chance to prove their worth.

The problems that the team focused on belong to the general class of optimization problems. The main example is the Ising model, which describes the interaction of a large number of spins within a lattice. The goal is to find the ground state, which is the orientation of spins that minimizes the interaction energy. The problem is computationally hard because there are many local minima (pseudo-ground-states) that can fool a search algorithm.

New options in harvesting light.

Significant new potentials for light harvesting through narrowing the bandgap of titania and graphene quantum dots have been uncovered by scientists.

Very nice.

Out of the Fog and Hypres win contracts to develop cryogenic radio frequency systems and quantum memory technologies.

Is search of the sound of silence.

To a physicist, perfect quiet is the ultimate noise. Silence your cellphone, still your thoughts, and muffle every kind of vibration, and you would still be left with quantum noise. It represents an indeterminacy deep within nature, bursts of static and inexplicable motions that cannot be gotten rid of, or made sense of. It seems devoid of meaning.

Considering how pervasive this noise is, you might presume that physicists would have a good explanation for it. But it remains one of the great unsolved problems in science. Quantum theory is silent not just on where the noise comes from, but on how exactly it enters the world. The theory’s defining equation, the Schrödinger equation, is completely deterministic. There is no noise in it at all. To explain why we observe quantum particles to be noisy, we need some additional principle.

Continue reading “The Noise at the Bottom of the Universe” »

He may or may not be joking.