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A Chinese man has been sentenced to three years in a U.S. prison for conspiring to steal high-tech U.S. corn seeds with the intention of transporting them to China, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday.

Mo Hailong, 46, pleaded guilty in January in federal court in Iowa to conspiring to steal patented corn seeds from DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto Co. Mo was employed as director of the international business of the Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group Co Ltd.

(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

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As I have continued for over a year to repeat that for any company or government entity to not include QC in their 5+ yrs future state roadmap is truly enabling their company or government to be easy pickings for hackers.


Quantum scientist Michele Mosca will discuss security in the coming quantum age during a live Webcast tonight at 7 P.M.

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Stockholm: The Nobel Physics prize was the second of the awards to be given away, on Tuesday, to a Birtish trio — scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz for revealing the secrets of exotic matter.

Thouless, 82, is professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. Haldane, 65, is a professor at Princeton University, and Kosterlitz, born in 1942, teaches at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The laureates will share the eight million Swedish kronor (around $931,000 or 834,000 euros) prize sum. Thouless won one-half of the prize, while Haldane and Hosterlitz share the other half.

“This year’s laureates opened the door on an unknown world where matter can assume strange states. They have used advanced mathematical methods to study unusual phases, or states, of matter, such as superconductors, superfluids or thin magnetic films. Thanks to their pioneering work, the hunt is now on for new and exotic phases of matter,” said the Nobel jury.

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Single neutral atoms trapped individually in optical microtraps are incredibly useful tools for studying quantum physics, as the atoms then exist in complete isolation from the environment. Arrays of optical microtraps containing single atoms could enable quantum logic devices, quantum information processing, and quantum simulation.

While single atom trapping has already been achieved, there are still many challenges to overcome. One such challenge is making sure each trap holds no more than one atom at a time, and also keeping it there so it won’t escape. This requires uniform optical microtraps, which have yet been fully realized.

Now, Ken’ichi Nakagawa and co‐workers at the University of Electro‐Communications, Tokyo, Japan, together with scientists across Japan and China, have successfully demonstrated an optimization method for ensuring the creation of uniform holographic microtrap arrays to capture single rubidium (87Rb) atoms.

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Computation is stuck in a rut. The integrated circuits that powered the past 50 years of technological revolution are reaching their physical limits.

This predicament has computer scientists scrambling for new ideas: new devices built using novel physics, new ways of organizing units within computers and even algorithms that use new or existing systems more efficiently. To help coordinate new ideas, Sandia National Laboratories has assisted organizing the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Rebooting Computing held Oct. 17–19.

Researchers from Sandia’s Data-driven and Neural Computing Dept. will present three papers at the conference, highlighting the breadth of potential non-traditional neural computing applications.

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The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to scientists based in the US, France, and the Netherlands for breakthroughs in designing molecular machines that can carry out tasks— and even mimic a four-wheel-drive car — when given a jolt of energy.

Winners J. Fraser Stoddart, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, and Bernard L. Feringa discovered how to build tiny motors — 1,000 times thinner than a strand of hair.

The machinery includes rings on axles, spinning blades, and even unimaginably small creations consisting of only a few molecules that can lift themselves off a surface like tiny robots rising on tip-toe. Those molecular robots can pluck, grasp, and connect individual amino acids. The machines can also be used as a novel mechanism of drug delivery.

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