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Leading Australian engineer and physicist, Professor Andrea Morello, was today named inaugural recipient of the Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing by the prestigious American Physical Society, the world’s leading organisation of physicists.

Morello, a professor in UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications and head of the Quantum Spin Control group at the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, was awarded the prize “for remarkable achievements in the experimental development of spin qubits in silicon”.

The prize, endowed by the International Business Machines Corp, is named for two of the founding fathers of modern information science, both classical and quantum.

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PARIS ─ A proposed space nation called Asgardia is now accepting applications for future citizens.

Leaders of the Asgardia project discussed the prospective space nation at a news conference in Paris Wednesday (Oct. 12). The leaders aim to launch Asgardia’s first satellite in 2017 and say they would like to eventually have a space station where some, but not all, of its planned 150 million (mostly Earth-dwelling) nationals would live and work.

Asgardia, named after the Norse gods’ home of Asgard, will be a democracy with an emphasis on the freedom of the individual to develop space technologies, according to Igor Ashurbeyli, Asgardia project team leader and founder. People can now apply to be selected as one of the first 100,000 citizens through the nation’s website, asgardia.space. At the time of publication, the number of applicants has reached more than 84,000, according to the website. While Asgardia is not officially a nation (yet), prospective citizens must fulfil the legal requirements for Asgardia’s United Nations application — for example, they must be from nations that allow multiple citizenships. [Incredible Technology: How to Build a Space Station Colony].

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The space race is on, and it’s only a matter of time before humans land on Mars. With several different groups aiming for the red planet, there’s likely to be not one outpost among the stars, but many.

National space agencies and private transport companies are all competing to reach Mars and establish their own base of operations, and they all have very different motivations and ideas on how to govern their colonies once they get there.

If Elon Musk gets his way and manages to lower the cost of a trip to Mars, the floodgates will open and settlers will stream towards the red planet in mass numbers. The resulting chaos is likely to produce several different Martian metropolises with their own character, laws, and forms of government much like the city-states of ancient Greece.

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(Phys.org)—Physicists have implemented the first experimental demonstration of everlasting quantum coherence—the phenomenon that occurs when a quantum system exists in a superposition of two or more states at once. Typically, quantum coherence lasts for only a fraction of a second before decoherence destroys the effect due to interactions between the quantum system and its surrounding environment.

The collaboration of physicists, led by Gerardo Adesso at The University of Nottingham and with members from the UK, Brazil, Italy, and Germany, have published a paper on the demonstration of the extreme resilience of quantum coherence in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

“Quantum properties can be exploited for disruptive technologies but are typically very fragile,” Adesso told Phys.org. “Here we report an experiment which shows for the first time that quantum coherence in a large ensemble of nuclear spins can be naturally preserved (‘frozen’) under exposure to strong dephasing noise at room temperature, without external control, and for timescales as long as a second and beyond.”

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I’m excited to share I’ve been interviewed by the podcast of Anonymous, whose Facebook page has over 5 million likes. I believe I’m the only Presidential candidate to be interviewed by them. We go over all the areas of my 20-point political platform. I’m a supporter of many of the goals of Anonymous, and I believe in activist organizations aiming to better the world that listen to their conscience and not rules or the status quo: http://anonhq.com/anoncast-episode-17-zoltan-istvan-transhum…ed-states/ #transhumanism #ScienceCandidate #Election2016 #equality #Future #Anonymous

On this episode of The Anoncast, Alek had the chance to speak with Transhumanist Party Presidential Candidate Zoltan Istvan.

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Inside Doris Taylor’s lab at the Texas Heart Institute are ethereal white pig hearts, stripped of their cells and now a blank slate of an organ.

Removing cells from an organ is fairly simple for scientists like Taylor. Rebuilding the organ by injecting stem cells is the tricky part.

But that’s exactly what Taylor hopes to do: grow a human heart by injecting human stem cells into a “decellularized” organ.

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